Its interesting that in 1882 the authors refusal to give an ending would have been seen as challenging and innovative but to me in 2020 it seems like a cop-out. I don't need the undercurrents made clear to me - I can already see all that. I want an ending to the story.
The more interesting angle is that the guy should realise that the princess might direct him to the wrong door. His thought process about it is much more interesting to me than my own as the reader.
A 2020 version needs some extra twist at the end. The King, perhaps, knows his daughter all too well, and has put a wedding behind both doors. Or the Princess has loftier aims, and has secretly trained the tiger to attack the King, and usher in a new era of civility, but to do that (somehow or other ) she has to allow her love to marry someone else etc etc
Still, I love that things people wrote in 1882 are now being zinged accross the world by a huge world-spanning machine made of billions of devices that people in 1882 would barely have been able to imagine.
edit: drewzero1, elsewhere in this thread, reminds me of the They Might Be Giants song that looks at the situation from a much more 21st century perspective: http://tmbw.net/wiki/Lyrics:The_Lady_And_The_Tiger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nQemVw2Lb0
Had the story provided a conclusion, in 2020 or any other year, it would be entirely unremarkable.
The story could, for example, have explored the issue of which way the princess might lean from the guys point of view, which covers all the same human nature angles, and then it could also have gone on to have a proper ending. I value storycraft.
I'm not saying the story should have been different back then, I'm sure it was perfect for 1882, and thats why its remembered now. I'm interested in how I differ from the 1882 audience.
edit: and koans are more about invoking mind states beyond words, like a kind of mind-hack, than they are about pondering ponderable things.
The form of this story has used widely since, and those stories have been incredibly popular with both authors and audiences for well over 100 years now. Implying that a tried-and-true technique of story-telling lies outside of storycraft betrays basic a lack of understanding of the subject.
Story tellers enjoy this form for the challenge of balancing what the omniscient narrator reveals-- too much or too strong in one direction and the whole thing falls flat. Readers enjoy the form because it feels a bit like ski jumping-- the writer provides the momentum and the reader's imagination leaps off the end with all the story's implications flying past.
In fact, Nabokov balanced this same form masterfully in the short story, "Signs and Symbols." The effect there is that the reader leaps off into a level of... well, I don't want to ruin it. :) But it's enough to say that outside of VR I don't think that story could have been effectively written without using the lady-or-the-tiger form.
This kind of device is used to great success in modern fiction, such as Stephen King's (non-supernatural!) short story "All that you love will be taken away", where the conclusion is not only open-ended, but also left to chance!
To me, the ending question is interesting. I want to know what happens! I think the princess leads her lover to the tiger, after all her temper is barbaric and she also thinks she'll reunite with him in the afterlife. That bloodshed though...
It's also remarkable in that it apparently inspired the Monty Hall door challenge, which is of obvious interest to the HN crowd.
In the early 90's, my English teacher read this story to the class and it blew my teenage mind. It's been one of my favorite short stories ever since.
Or some forms of witch trials I suppose ("will she float or sink") but I'm never sure how much of that is true and how much is fiction, as in Monty Python's ;)
I was hoping the guy would turn around and knock on the door under the king, and the priest would come out and marry him to the Princess.
Alternatively, if “it mattered not that [criminals] might already possess a wife and family”, why couldn’t the guy marry the princess after marrying the damsel of the court?
On the other hand if he truly understood the depth of the Princess's jealousy and expected her to indicate the door with the Tiger, he would realise her cruelty and choose the door opposite to that she indicated, in order to forsake her and enjoy a happy life.
So either way he should choose the other door.
> How often, in her waking hours and in her dreams, had she started in wild horror, and covered her face with her hands as she thought of her lover opening the door on the other side of which waited the cruel fangs of the tiger!
contra
> But how much oftener had she seen him at the other door! How in her grievous reveries had she gnashed her teeth, and torn her hair, when she saw his start of rapturous delight as he opened the door of the lady! How her soul had burned in agony when she had seen him rush to meet that woman, with her flushing cheek and sparkling eye of triumph; [...].
It is also interesting to see the sprinkles of social Darwinism throughout out the story.
> Had it not been for the moiety of barbarism in her nature, it is probable that lady would not have been there; but her intense and fervid soul would not allow her to be absent on an occasion in which she was so terribly interested.
-- https://twitter.com/VeryShortStory/status/502108012501544960
> To my surprise, the King agreed, and I opened the other door. Too late, as the princess leapt on me, I realized my mistake.
-- https://twitter.com/VeryShortSequel/status/50210825752861081...
There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger.
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.To make a projective test from this story one needs to ask a few hundred of participants for answers, to look for patterns in answers, to form hypotheses how personal traits correlate with patterns in answers, then to run correlational study with an other group of participants. Maybe something would be found. Maybe not.
To make something like Kohlberg's dilemmas one would need a theory to predict in advance patterns in answers without gathering the "live data".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projective_test [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_o... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_dilemma
Could someone on trial ignore the doors, to force the king to execute the decision?
"The Lady or the Tiger?: and Other Logic Puzzles" by Raymond Smullyan
Edit: googled...
https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/rob_eshman/1176...
A 5 sentence version of this story would not have stayed with me the same way this did. Just like Aesop's Fables, or the Brothers Grimm, wouldn't have the impact on people/civilization in general if they had been just the moral of the story.