44 pages • 1 hour read
Tea ObrehtThe Tiger's Wife
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Power of Storytelling and Myth
By setting her story in an imaginary country with no precise date, Obreht highlights the folktale and fairytale elements from the beginning of the novel. Set adrift from exact facts and history, Obreht weaves together folktale and reality, tradition and modernity, creating a tapestry that underscores the impact of a destabilizing war followed by a restless peace. Echoes of the past constantly mirror the present. For example, Natalia’s grandfather’s war, WWII, nestles next to Natalia’s war, the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. Both the grandfather and Natalia grow up enduring lengthy, country and village destroying wars. Folktales are one way to cope with the fear and ugliness of reality.
The novel’s echoing structure delineates two wars, two childhoods, two doctors, and two folktales: the tiger’s wife and the deathless man. These echoes serve to magnify the similarities between the time periods and narratives, but they also destabilize and confuse the reader about what time period is which, adding a constant element of unreality to the narrative.
The grandfather also lacks a first name, only referring to himself as Dr. Leandro in the first deathless man story. He is constantly referred to as “grandfather,” even in the narrative of his childhood. This namelessness renders him into a fairy tale character himself, much like the similarly nameless tiger’s wife.
Myth is at once universal—as readers can freely imagine and see themselves and their lives in it—and extremely personal. The mythic transforms into the personal in this novel as the reader discovers that the story of the tiger’s wife revolves around real people living in Galina, whom the grandfather knew.
Folktales that turn out to be originally based in reality reinforce the idea of the permeability of reality by myth and vice versa. The mythic and the real stand face to face throughout the novel. For example, a real tiger comes to live in Galina’s woods. The tiger is both a character from a tale, Shere Khan from The Jungle Book, and a real, though improbable, presence. In another instance of the blending of folktale and reality, Natalia follows the man who takes the heart from the crossroads, completely convinced, as is the reader, that she is trailing the deathless man.
Stories, legends, folktales and myths form a crucial way for people to deal with and explain reality, particularly the traumatic reality of death and war. Natalia herself turns to the construction of the story of the tiger’s wife, her grandfather’s last gift to her, in order to cope with the reality of his death. Furthermore, the deathless man also offers such a myth: a story that ties together generations through the experience of death and coping with it. Ultimately, Obreht’s novel pronounces that storytelling and myth bind all people together into a human family, through such common experiences and struggles.
Death
Death wears many faces in this novel, most spectacularly the face of Death’s nephew: Gavran Gailé, the deathless man.
The deathless man finds the grandfather at significant points in the novel, and every time it is a surprise to the grandfather. This fact mirrors an important truth: you cannot find death. It must find you. For example, when Natalia seeks the deathless man to question him about her grandfather’s death, she finds only a grieving husband and father, the kind and gentle fisherman, Barba Ivan. Natalia is unable to answer whether her grandfather met his death while seeking her or whether he was looking for the deathless man. However, the reader suspects that he was on his way to find Natalia. After all, when he died suddenly, he carried a page torn from The Jungle Book that contains the clues Natalia needs to discover the tiger’s wife tale.
The grandfather’s whole life is an attempt to seek redemption for the events that occur in Galina, and the deathless man's story becomes the grandfather's way to reconcile himself to the realities of his life. He carries the copy of The Jungle Book as a reminder and as a promise: a reminder of what he owes and a promise to repay his debts. The missing copy of The Jungle Book indicates that the grandfather did find the deathless man, repaid his debt, and found the redemption that he sought.
Death stalks the pages of this novel, not only in the form of war, but also in man’s oppression of “outsiders,” the dangerous gossip of closed minds, and the distancing that enables man to create a hated “other” from a neighbor.
Never-ending War
In the retelling of the grandfather’s stories, the reader is confronted constantly with the mirroring and parallels between Natalia’s life and her grandfather’s. For example, they both have childhoods overshadowed by war and both choose to be doctors because of those wars. Thematically, this connection serves to reinforce an overall theme of the book: war is constant and inevitable. The grandfather acknowledges this fact to the deathless man, saying, “‛This war never ends…It was there when I was a child and it will be here for my children’s children’” (301). War never ends; it simply transforms from one war into another.
The grandfather experiences the German invasion during World War II in Galina, and the later civil war is both his war and his granddaughter’s. Though the grandfather attempts to live in peace and in a unified world, saying “‛I am on no side. I am on all sides,” the grandfather’s acceptance of difference is far from universal in his adult life (299). Despite his good intentions and attempts to be helpful, the grandfather also found that as a child he is powerless against the evils of war. War also permeates both folktales, a testament to its endlessness and to the damage left behind.
Science versus Faith
The grandfather, a man of science, logic, and rationality who is not at all religious, seeks to explain to himself and to Natalia how he came to have his version of faith—in a tiger. As both a real and mystical being, the tiger represents an intersection of faith and science, reality and the fabulous. In a similar fashion, the deathless man is a powerful figure representing the real inevitability of death but in a way that cannot be fully explained through logic, therefore expressing a mystical element. Logic and the inexplicable constantly oppose and reveal one another throughout the novel.
The grandfather seems to be a completely unsuperstitious, irreligious man. Yet, he shares important moral events from his life in the form of folktales, rather than as straight autobiography. This is to teach Natalia what he has learned: that the rational can only explain part of life, while hope or faith give a person the rest. Both are needed to get through life, to understand it, and to explain it.
The deathless man is also a man of science, a physician who believed that he could work in harmony with his uncle, Death. He soon found that his desire to help people live, particularly the woman he loves, overcomes his agreement with Death. He could not beat Death, and he yearns for the forgiveness of his uncle, which would mean that he is finally allowed to die. Death is both a scientific and a transformative, spiritual experience.
Other characters wrestle with the duality between faith and rationality in their lives. For example, Barba Ivan collects the items left for the dead. He knows that the legend of the mora is not true, but somehow through his acting as the mora, people are left with more faith. Though many of them must suspect that he, or someone else, is acting as the mora, they continue to honor the spirits of the dead with gifts.
Because science fails to account for the human spirit and emotions—man’s greatness of heart, for example, cannot be measured by a scale or seen with the naked eye—the grandfather chooses to see the world and live like a child. That is, in hope rather than in fear. This conscious choice informs his entire life and how he copes with the deaths of the two people he likes most in the village: the tiger’s wife and the apothecary.
The village is marked by its religiosity, small-mindedness, and superstitions. Both the tiger’s wife and the apothecary are outsiders, sacrificed to keep the village at peace with itself. The grandfather comes to despise the village for what he sees as its ignorant, illiterate, and superstitious ways, and he escapes at his earliest opportunity. However, he does not lose his faith entirely; he simply redefines it in his own terms.
Another example of this theme is in the deal that Natalia extracts from Duré. She buries his cousin’s “heart" at the crossroads, but in exchange, Duré must allow his wife and children to receive medical treatment. Though she originally scoffs at Duré’s beliefs, her own belief that her grandfather died searching for the deathless man forces her to reexamine her ideas. Science and faith are melded together in a give-and-take. Natalia learns that they are not enemies, faith and science, but allies, if at times uneasy ones.
Ultimately, Obreht’s novel depicts a human experience that contains questions for which there are no answers, questions that cannot be answered by scientific, rational discourse. These answers must be felt or experienced, as the grandfather depicts them, through living and dying in fear or in hope.
