24 pages • 48 minutes read
SakiThe Interlopers
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1919A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Family Feuds
Stories featuring family feuds, from Romeo and Juliet to Yellowstone, show how an initial dispute between individuals can become distorted and take on a different meaning as the enmity expands over several members of a family or even over multiple generations. The family feud in Saki’s story started as a minor legal matter but grew over time as it took on an emotional element disproportionate to the economic interests at stake. The grandfathers of Ulrich and Georg went to court over a disagreement about who owned an unproductive strip of woodland. The Znaeym ancestor did not agree with the court’s decision and, the narrator says, “a long series of poaching affrays and similar scandals had embittered the relationships between the families for three generations” (16). Ulrich and Georg grew up in the angry milieu of the feud and would have had little occasion to reconsider the vitriol that was passed down to them. In fact, with the ascension of Ulrich and Georg to the heads of their respective families, the dispute grew from a legal debate over unremarkable woods to a personal battle. Ulrich set out that night to confront Georg, whom he calls “the tireless game-snatcher and raider” (16), and his men “prowling thieves” and “marauders” (17). Would their grandfathers approve of their heirs, members of the landed gentry and esteemed society, becoming cold-blooded murderers for the sake of a squabble over some inconsequential land? One should not presume, but rarely in literature do the violent outcomes of multi-generational feuds bring satisfaction to the original opponents.
Ulrich comes to realize the pointlessness of the feud after being trapped with his enemy under the tree branch. He admits to Georg that they “have quarrelled like devils all our lives over this stupid strip of forest, where the trees can’t even stand upright in a breath of wind” (19). Facing his mortality when the branch pinned him and in physical pain, he can put the feud into perspective: “there are better things in life than getting the better of a boundary dispute” (20). Among those “better things” are peace and friendship. His family’s argument with Georg’s family denied both men the chance to be friends when they were younger. However, he sees the opportunity to put the past and the bitterness behind them and start anew. Georg sees a new future too. He can avoid being a poacher by merely asking for permission to hunt and extending a similar invitation to Ulrich. Unfortunately, the proposed solution comes too late. Given that both men have teams of foresters in their service and may well have children and/or siblings, Ulrich would presumably not have ended the feud even if he had killed Georg. Georg’s family would, in that case, have only greater reason to continue trespassing and harassing Ulrich. The only satisfactory solution is the one Ulrich ultimately offers: friendship. Yet, when the wolves are finished with them, the men will have left no record of their agreement. Other members of the family may renew the quarrel.
Humans Versus Nature
Nature plays an important role in “The Interlopers,” not just in the plot but in the thematic contrast with human nature. Nature is presented as an uncontrollable, unfeeling force that acts out of simple instinct. Ulrich and Georg, in comparison, can make choices. Saki highlights this contrast, which raises questions about humans as animals.
From the start, Ulrich ignores signals from the natural world that danger is afoot. He is out on a windy winter night, which already shows that he is motivated by something other than concern for his safety and comfort. His desire to kill his adversary is so strong that he misinterprets the behavior of the animals as a sign that Georg is in his woods. Ulrich fails to acknowledge the signals being sent when he sees the narrator says, the “roebuck, which usually kept in the sheltered hollows during a storm-wind, were running like driven things tonight, and there was movement and unrest among the creatures that were wont to sleep through the dark hours” (17). Though he is correct that Georg is on the land, Ulrich does not consider that there may be other reasons that the creatures are behaving differently, such as wanting to avoid predators. The animals of the forest are heeding their instincts; the men are heeding only their hatred.
Nature intervenes with violence of its own. When the branch falls, the men are rendered helpless. Instead of killing each other, they are allowed to think, reflect, and empathize (19). Ulrich examines their history in light of their current predicament and states, “Lying here tonight, thinking, I’ve come to think we’ve been rather fools” (20). At that moment, the branch falling on them would seem, literally, a blessing from above for bringing about this change of heart. However, nature strikes another blow by bringing the wolves, the true predators on the land. Part of the story’s great irony is that the men face death because they acted intelligently, not despite it. Ending their dispute and calling for mutual aid was the most reasonable thing to do in the circumstances. But this act brings the wolves. If one of them had immorally and irrationally killed the other, at least that person would have survived. Saki creates an ironic (and somewhat bleak) moral universe in which vice is rewarded and virtue is punished. And the final victory goes neither to the good nor the wicked, but to animals who are capable of neither virtue nor vice.
The Power and Limits of Social Norms
Saki grew up in the middle- to upper-class society of Victorian England (1837-1901) and enjoyed lambasting its pretensions and customs, which sometimes disguised baser motivations. The characters in “The Interlopers” are not English, but they are the heads of families and members of the landed gentry. They are aware of their positions in society. Codes of honor govern their behavior, but only to a certain extent, and occasionally that honor clashes with the rule of law.
Georg’s grandfather, the narrator says, “had never acquiesced in the judgment of the Courts” (16), and thus being denied legal protection, he and his descendants made their actions covert. The Znaeym family not accepting the ruling but turning instead to poaching and raiding suggests that pride and a sense of injustice were involved. Moreover, as poaching is not done in the open, they can enact their grievances while still avoiding the label of “thieves” in the general public. Georg refers to the land as Ulrich’s “stolen forest” (17), thus calling on the “an eye for an eye” or “tit for tat” social norm to justify his illegal forays.
When Ulrich and Georg meet face to face, they intend murder, but the social norms and laws of their time and culture dictate that killing be justified by some current provocation, not just a decades-long feud. They hesitate to pull the trigger or provoke their enemy for, the narrator says, “a man who has been brought up under the code of a restraining civilization cannot easily nerve himself to shoot down his neighbor in cold blood and without word spoken, except for an offense against his hearth and honor” (17). Ironically, it is nature—the fallen branch of the beech tree—rather than civilization that restrains them and allows them to summon their more civilized natures.
The return to civility is evident when Ulrich offers Georg a drink from his wine flask. Georg’s initial refusal is partly based on his honor code, which prevents him from drinking with an enemy, but later he accepts it (at least in spirit, if not physically) as a token of friendship. In imagining their new friendship, they envision themselves in a more formal code of behavior, one of celebrating high feast days and issuing invitations for hunting parties. However, even in this, there is a minor wrinkle: the men now hope to be the first to show honor to the other, an indication that their bitter hatred has been transmuted into the more socially acceptable form of competition. That is, perhaps, Saki’s way of suggesting that the social mores and norms people value are channels for more brutish impulses.
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