Compare And Contrast Mending Wall And The Interlopers

Most people today value privacy, especially privacy from their neighbors. Some build fences, others plant trees, all in order to avoid the presence of the people who live next door. However, the avoidance of neighbors is one of the causes of the decline in civic engagement and trust in modern American society. This is seen in the stories “Mending Wall” and “The Interlopers,” by Robert Frost and Saki, respectively. In these stories, conflicts arise because of the physical borders that separate the characters, but these literal walls also symbolize the figurative walls that lie in between them as well. In a similar way in American society today, both physical and figurative walls have been constructed between people, resulting in decreasing social capital and increasing social distance.

This is seen in “Mending Wall” when the narrator describes the stone wall that runs between his neighbor and himself, and how they repair it every spring: “And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go” (Frost 1). They keep both a physical wall in between themselves as they walk, but also a mental wall because they seem to not agree on purpose of having a wall between their properties. The narrator thinks that the wall is pointless, because they have no reason for a physical boundary between their properties since they are both farmers with no animals. However, the neighbor just repeats in response each time with ”Good walls make good neighbors” (Frost 1). Communication has broken down between them, and as a result both are left with a strained relationship and only seem to meet each other when it is time to mend the wall in the spring. So while the physical wall provides a purpose for meeting each other and talking, their relationship may not be as strained if they simply did not have the wall in between each