Picture the following scenario in your head. A man is standing trial in an arena. There are two doors, and his sentence is determined by whichever door he opens. One door holds a tiger, ready to rip him into shreds, while the other holds a beautiful lady, who will marry him if he opens her door. Nobody knows which door holds which. This is the setting of the short story The Lady, or the Tiger, written by Frank R. Stockton. A theme in this story is that sometimes your choices don’t matter.
In the story, a king makes up a judicial system in which he has no responsibility at all. The convict chooses a door, and whatever is behind the door is his sentence. If it’s a beautiful lady, she marries him, and if it’s a tiger, he gets mauled to death. A random peasant and the princess fall in love, and he is put on trial for loving the princess. The princess finds out which door is which, and is given the choice of letting her lover die or having him marry another woman. She points her lover towards the door she chose for him, and he opens it without hesitation, abruptly ending the story.
While the ending is left unclear, we can see that the choice doesn’t affect the princess at all. If she directs her lover towards the tiger, he dies and she’ll never see him again, and if she directs him towards the lady, he gets married to someone else and will also be forever separated from the princess. Either way, she’ll lose him. Here, the king has set up a situation in which either way, the relationship of the lovers will be severed. No matter which door the princess chooses, the results will be the same for her.
In The Lady, or the Tiger, the princess is given the illusion of having a choice. In reality, from her perspective, it’s all the same. Her choice in the end, is pointless, and either way her lover is dead to her.