The Tiger Bride Analysis

Death is a nebulous, inescapable force that everyone must confront and learn to deal with in some way. In The Tiger’s Wife, Death is everywhere, in the near constant fighting and dangerous remainders of several wars. For “The Tiger’s Bride”, however, Death remains just outside the scope of the story, brushing along the edges of our awareness but never put plainly before us like the many corpses of Obreht’s novel. Or at least it seems this way until we recognize The Beast as more than just a tiger making play at humanity, that he is instead Death manifested in flesh and fur. If, then, the tiger is Death given physical form, what does this mean for The Tiger’s Wife? Even here, the tiger is tied to imagery of Hell, devils, and Death. It open for

Galina, as the tiger visits it, is described as being “marked with heavy snowstorms” that cut off Galina from easy escape, and furthermore, “the ground was frozen solid” (110-11). Again, we see the imagery of an icy hell, but here, the tiger, devils, and Death are even more closely connected as the villagers believe the tiger is a devil, starting from Vladiša’s first sighting of it. To them, Death is also one of the many devils of their lives, as Obreht writes, “Sometimes, the devil was Death…” (106). Once more, the tiger is the devil, and so therefore it is

At the end of the story, we again see it when Natalia says, “… my grandfather did not die as he had once told me men die – in fear – but in hope, like a child” (335). Perhaps the most significant passage comes from Natalia’s grandfather himself, “But children die how they have been living – in hope. They don’t know what’s happening, so they expect nothing” (154). To die as a child then is to meet Death as the tiger’s wife and the narrator of “The Tiger’s Bride” meet their tigers in the end, without pretense, expectation, disdain or even