The Tiger's Wife

Natalia narrates most of the novel, excepting the deathless man stories that she allows her grandfather to tell in his own voice. She imagines portions of several chapters as her grandfather’s childhood tiger, and it is her voice that pieces together the tale of the tiger’s wife. She is brave, bold, and caring, crossing borders into a hostile country to treat orphans. Though her age is never directly mentioned, at the beginning of the novel as she is driving to Brejevina, she has completed her training as a doctor and is probably in her mid-twenties. She is a few years older at the end of the novel.

A doctor, she wears her white coat constantly, both a protection and a shield during the unsettled, post-wartimes in which she travels across. She also wears her coat in emulation of her grandfather, who also wore his white coat at strategic times—such as when rescuing her from the customs authorities. She hopes the coat, the badge of a doctor, will lend her its prestige and protection.

Though the reader experiences the novel through Natalia’s eyes, Obreht gives little dimension to Natalia herself; she is the voice of the novel, but not its center.