Forgiveness and Friendship in The Interlopers by Saki

The Interlopers by Saki shows many different challenges, from Man vs Man to Man vs Nature. This is a short story that begins with Ulrich Von Gradwitz. A man who was watching out for his forest hoping to find his “enemy” or the man he hated Georg Znaeym. The Gradwitz family and the Znaeym family had a feud that had been carried over for the last three generations because of some forest land. Ulrich grandfather had ended up suing and winning the ownership of the land in court which was being illegally owned by the Znaeym family. 

On one cold night Ulrich went out hunting with some men, but they weren’t looking for any animals they were looking for a human. But Ulrich was hoping to find Georg Znaeym in the forest as well. This part of the story taught me what hatred is like. Ulrich has won ownership of the land that the families been feuding over, but still feel the need to kill this man. Right now Ulrich heart is filled with hate and this is no longer about land it has become personal to him. 

Next both men are face to face and both are armed with a rifle and with the mindset to kill. But before either of them could say anything or shoot their rifle a beech tree fell and pinned them both down to the ground. But one even that stood out to me during this is while they both were pinned down helpless under the tree Ulrich offered Znaeym a hand during their struggle to get out. This stands out to me as friendship. Now we are starting to see the hatred decrease and start to become more of a friendship. They both need each other right now and at this point the feud shouldn’t mean anything to them. This is a matter of life and death, and if a piece of forest land is more important than their life that’s the saddest thing ever because no land is worth or more important than a life. But the too men finally come to an agreement and forgave each other. They agreed on treating one another as neighbors, instead of as enemies. The men’s forgiveness towards each other wasn’t easy at all they both had to weigh the pros and cons of ending the feud. But it was either they make peace between each other and work together to get freed, or they could stay angry at one another and never get rescued from under the tree. But at the end of the day in my opinion they have made a huge jump from where they started. They went from hating each other and wanting to kill each other to becoming friends and agreeing on treating each other like a neighbor to forgiving each other and trying to help each other escape from under the tree. 

I think the purpose of the author making this story was to show that friendship and forgiveness over powers hatred. No matter how long or how much hatred you have it can always be resolved by forgiveness and friendship. 

Works Cited

1. Jacobs, W. W. (2018). The interlopers. In The lady of the barge (pp. 47-55). Blurb.
2. Bloom, H. (Ed.). (2009). Saki (Hector Hugh Munro). Infobase Publishing.
3. Kinkead-Weekes, M., & Gregor, I. (Eds.). (1982). Saki: A collection of critical essays. Prentice Hall.
4. Canby, H. S. (1986). The short story in English. Oxford University Press.
5. Sternlicht, S. (2014). Masterpieces of the 20th-century short story. Routledge.
6. Mendelson, M. (2009). Decadence and dissipation: Saki's critical vision. In Saki (pp. 135-154). Infobase Publishing.
7. Berman, R. (2017). The art of conflict: Saki’s short stories. In The Philosophy of Saki (pp. 101-124). Palgrave Macmillan.
8. Abney, M. (2013). Two Good Men in Evil Plots: Saki’s “The Interlopers” and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Welcome to the Monkey House”. The Explicator, 71(4), 237-241.
9. Banks, L. C. (2009). Saki (H. H. Munro) and the Edwardian Short Story. In The History of British Women's Writing, 1880-1920 (pp. 252-265). Palgrave Macmillan.
10. Stranahan, C. (2011). The interlopers: a strong whiff of something French. The Explicator, 69(1), 32-34.