The Tiger Rising

Rob is an outsider at school by choice. He has had many talks with Mr. Phelmer about his lack of interaction with other students, lack of communication, and poor school performance (15). He skips eating lunch and sits alone. Rob thinks of himself as “strange,” as evidenced when he reflects that Sistine is “even stranger than he was” (8). The Threemonger brothers harass Rob but cannot get him to respond to their taunts. Other kids call him names. Rob actively avoids social contact and response. He is thrilled when he learns he will miss school, showing he prefers to avoid social interaction.

Rob is not necessarily happy in his self-imposed isolation; he is lonely. One of the wishes he buries most deeply in his suitcase is the wish for a friend (36). However, Rob’s withdrawal is safe. He does not have to experience the pain of talking about “important things like his mother or the tiger” (25), which are too closely tied to his emotions.

Sistine is also a newcomer and immediate outsider at school. While Rob’s passive silence pushes others away, Sistine actively alienates people: She starts fights and has an antagonistic, superior attitude. She is rude to Rob on the bus before they even speak. Both of their approaches make them targets for bullying because they are alien to the rest of the student body. Rob observes that the other kids look at Sistine “as if she had just stepped off a spaceship from another planet” (11). Rob can relate to Sistine. They bond over a shared dislike of the school, and a shared appreciation of beauty. On their first bus ride home, they unite: “[T]he two of them sat apart from it all as if their seat was an island in the sea of sweat and exhaust” (24).

Rob has kept everything to himself for so long that he needs to express himself, and he confides almost helplessly in Sistine: “Every secret, magic word he had ever known—tiger and cancer and Caroline—every word in his suitcase seemed to fall right out of him when he stood before Sistine” (78). Rob learns he cannot keep his emotional defenses up and simultaneously keep Sistine’s friendship. When they quarrel and Sistine starts to walk away, Rob likens it to “looking into a fun-house mirror. It was like watching himself walk away” (49), as if Rob was closing his suitcase forever, denying his true self. Sistine, in turn, teaches Rob a lesson in communication. Friends share important things with each other and don’t keep secrets. As Rob releases more of his emotions, he helps Sistine out of her cage of denial and anger, comforting her and telling the truth. They are able to fight and forgive. Both discover that friendship and the happiness it brings is worth the risk of emotional pain. Rob doesn’t mind returning to school because he knows his friend, Sistine, will be there.

Rob recognizes that the reason he likes Sistine so much is because, “When she saw something beautiful, the sound of her voice changed” (95). Both Rob and Sistine are sensitive to the power of art. Each is positively affected by poetry and painting. Rob experiences a kind of relief from his hot, itchy rash-like emotions when he looks at images in the library’s art book, which make him “feel cool and sweet inside” (10). He appreciates the strong rhythm of Willie May’s advice to “let the sadness rise,” and says the words “as if they were part of a poem” (38).

Beauty softens Sistine’s anger. When she talks about the Sistine Chapel, or Rob’s carvings, or quotes “the Tyger,” her normally loud, assertive voice quiets, and her words sound “the way all those things made him feel, as if the world, the real world, had been punched through, so he could see something wonderful and dazzling on the other side of it” (95). Artistic beauty has the intrinsic ability to take Rob and Sistine away from the mundane and free them from their cages, if only momentarily. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is “like fireworks” (58), and “The Tyger,” is “like music, but better” (116). Art brings joy and release, and artistic ability is a valued skill. When Sistine compares Rob to Michelangelo, he understands the power of that compliment.

While art and words affect emotions, they are also channels to express feelings. Rob and Sistine both value the power of words. Rob’s policy is “not to say things” (23), but the words that do spill from him are valuable, like “magic” (78) or “gold coins” (23). They are words from his suitcase that he only expresses to Sistine. Words can hurt and injure: The words Rob angrily uses against his father “sprang out coiled and explosive” (111), and Rob feels Sistine’s hateful words as “shards of broken glass” (100). Words can comfort and heal. Rob uses his mother’s words to help Sistine, and when he whispers his mother’s name, it is as “sweet as forbidden candy” (62).

The figures Rob whittles come from his subconscious. They express what Rob is feeling and thinking of in the moment; things he doesn’t allow himself to consciously verbalize. Rob sets out to make the tiger but ends up carving Sistine. He takes another piece of wood and finds Cricket emerging. Sistine makes Rob feel like he is a piece of wood “opening up” and unsure what he will become (41)—and what emotions he will release. Even Rob’s father expresses himself artistically by the end of the novel. He can again sing the music he and his wife sang together; an expression of love for Caroline and Rob, and a return to the father Rob remembers.