After reading the Interlopers, I must say that great sadness filled my heart. What should happen to two men who have feuded all their lives whilst walking in the forest, armed and ready to shoot down the other? Nature answers this question for us. The men are both taken captive by the wisdom of nature, pinned down by trees and helpless, the men realize that sometimes life is too short to feud, this is a major theme of the story, as one will see later in this post. One man offers the other wine, a symbol of their realization that feuding for your entire life is pointless. When the other man rejects this symbolic bridge, the two feud for a little more, and then the magic of nature happens. The two men overcome their feud, and become friends, imagining the great good they could bring to the land if they should stop feuding. This is what should have happened a long time ago, and this message is what society should be based upon today: that feuding is unnecessary, as more good comes from not feuding than to feud. What joy struck my soul when I found out that this feud between these two men (which has gone back generations) has finally ceased. Then came the grievous part. After yelling and screaming for help, the men finally see figures coming. I use the term figures because the creatures were not humans, rather vicious, hungry creatures that would mute this metaphorical trumpet of friendship for all eternity and reiterate to us the theme of this story (life is too short to feud), and these creatures are known as wolves.
It is clear to see that I predict the future being grim for our friends. Obviously, two mere mortals caught beneath a fallen tree, immobile and weak, are no match for the wolf, strengthened with hunger, mobile, and agile. Furthermore, our friends will eventually be discovered by their men. Using the basics of human nature and the feuding in this book, one can tell that the men will blame the men of the other hunter. This will cause the feud to escalate, as now it's been taken to a more personal level. "My leader has been killed, and I believe your leader, whom I already dislike, is at fault for it," is what at least one man will think when they've discovered their leader killed.
Regarding the other stories we have read, I believe that the ending scheme in all of these stories is very similar if not identical. The author invokes your imagination to determine what happens. Sometimes, he/she does a better job of this than the other authors. However, all in all, this is an effective way of ending your stories if you can invoke even the tiniest amount of curiosity in the reader. This curiosity will make it practically necessary for you to finish the story in your head, on your own. And because it's a customized ending, you'll always enjoy the end of the book or get more out of the theme.
The more I think about this book, the more I have to say about it. The title, The Interlopers, means more than just the interlopers who were expected to interfere with their feud in the beginning. The true interlopers, the ones who wouldn't interfere with their friendship or so they thought, were in fact the wolves, who did end up interloping (or interfering) in their friendship. Thus, the wolves are the interlopers.
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