Throughout “The Child by Tiger,” the narrator witnesses innocence and evil. He believes at first that Dick Prosser is an innocent person: Dick is nice to him and his friends, teaching them things an older brother would and being careful that they never hurt one another. The narrator’s opinion of Dick’s goodness changes when Dick kills several people in town, but not in a straightforward way. Rather, the narrator is now aware of something dark in human life more broadly that he doesn’t completely understand. This darkness is “something hateful and unspeakable in the souls of men.” He sees it in everyone and not just in Dick: ordinary townspeople display unprecedented rage and violence when they seek to capture and kill Dick, and the narrator even feels his own guilt because he’d known about the gun Dick used to commit his crimes, but he didn’t tell anyone. In this way, Dick’s crime does not just change the narrator’s opinion of Dick but changes his opinion of humanity as a whole. What is more, Dick becomes “a symbol of man’s evil innocence” to the narrator. This oxymoron expresses the narrator’s inability to categorize Dick as either innocent or evil after having seen him be both gentle and violent. Through the narrator’s changing perspective on Dick, himself, and others, the story suggests that evil and innocence are not always distinguishable in life, and that, in fact, they coexist within everyone.
When the narrator first hears of Dick’s crime, his view of Dick does not change straightforwardly from innocent to evil. The narrator’s complicated view of Dick is evident in how he neither participates in the mob’s rage and hatred towards Dick nor ignores it altogether. While the town is awake in a feverish state of alarm and rage, pursuing Dick through the square and retelling the story of his crimes, the narrator feels nausea and fear. He is unable to join in his neighbors’ hatred of Dick, yet he can no longer regard Dick as a friend, either. Furthermore, his new feeling is not the result of a transformation of Dick’s character but rather something new and alien that seems to have entered life as a whole. When the narrator gazes at Dick’s body hanging in the square, he cannot believe that he once admired and respected the person this used to be. He remarks that “something had come into our lives we could not understand”—suggesting that Dick’s crime and brutal death have unsettled his understanding of good and evil altogether.
This new darkness does not apply just to Dick but to everyone. The narrator sees Dick’s evil as “something hateful and unspeakable in the souls of all men.” In fact, even the narrator and his friends are not free from blame for Dick’s crime. The narrator and Randy feel fearful and guilty “as if somehow the crime lay on [their] shoulders,” because they had known about the gun Dick was keeping in his basement, and they hadn’t told anyone. The townspeople, in a general sense, are also not blameless. While they did not do anything to enable Dick’s crime, they show that they are capable of the same violence as Dick. They smash the windows of the hardware store and take guns and ammunition, and they set a pack of bloodthirsty dogs on his trail. To drive this point further home, the mob shoots Dick over 200 times, hangs him to a tree, and then puts his bloody, mangled body up for display in the town square. In so doing, they seem not to expose Dick’s violence but rather their own.
The narrator struggles to put together the innocence and evil he has witnessed over the course of the story. In particular, the narrator is bewildered by his gentle memories of Dick in light of Dick’s recent vengeance. When Mr. Shepperton reads aloud from the Bible Dick left behind, the narrator is baffled because the Psalm sounds so holy: “he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness.” The Psalm seems to represent an innocence the narrator no longer believes in. However, he is puzzled because Dick himself seemed to have believed in it, and this doesn’t fit with Dick’s violent actions. Contrary to what the Psalm suggests, the narrator thinks that Dick comes from an incomprehensible source of darkness. He reflects on a poem that seems to fit Dick more appropriately—a William Blake poem that asks how a frightful, menacing tiger could have been created. This unsettling poem expresses the menace that lurked in Dick and the incomprehensible darkness from which he seemed to come.
It seems that the narrator believes Dick was particularly menacing because he so mysteriously combined innocence and evil. The obscure place of darkness from which Dick seems to come is terrifying precisely because it is dark—within it, signs and reasons are invisible, misleading, and contradictory. The narrator is forced to recognize the paradox that Dick was both innocent and evil and that the same paradox exists within himself. In the end, he decides that Dick is both “a tiger and a child,” a phrase that captures both the darkness and innocence within all human beings.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Evil and Innocence ThemeTracker
Evil and Innocence Quotes in The Child by Tiger
He never boxed with us, of course, but Randy had two sets of gloves, and Dick used to coach us while we sparred. There was something amazingly tender and watchful about him. He taught us many things—how to lead, to hook, to counter and to block—but he was careful to see that we did not hurt each other.
See it! My eyes were glued upon it. Squarely across the bare board table, blue-dull, deadly in its murderous efficiency, lay a modern repeating rifle. Beside it lay a box containing one hundred rounds of ammunition, and behind it, squarely in the center, face downward on the table, was the familiar cover of Dick’s worn old Bible.
He looked at me and whispered, “It’s Dick!” And in a moment, “They say he’s killed four people.” “With— ” I couldn’t finish. Randy nodded dumbly, and we both stared there for a minute, aware now of the murderous significance of the secret we had kept, with a sudden sense of guilt and fear, as if somehow the crime lay on our shoulders.
The men on horseback reached him first. They rode up around him and discharged their guns into him. He fell forward in the snow, riddled with bullets. The men dismounted, turned him over on his back, and all the other men came in and riddled him. They took his lifeless body, put a rope around his neck, and hung him to a tree. Then the mob exhausted all their ammunition on the riddled carcass.
We saw it, tried wretchedly to make ourselves believe that once this thing had spoken to us gently, had been partner to our confidence, object of our affection and respect. And we were sick with nausea and fear, for something had come into our lives we could not understand.
For we would still remember the old dark doubt and loathing of our kind, of something hateful and unspeakable in the souls of men.
A symbol of man’s evil innocence, and the token of his mystery, a projection of his own unfathomed quality, a friend, a brother, and a mortal enemy, an unknown demon, two worlds together— a tiger and a child.
