The Interlopers By Saki

A Rivaled Friendship
In Saki’s short story, “The Interlopers”, it’s about two men with a three generation long hatred toward one another’s family. The author’s theme in the story is that to become friends before you lose the chance to. The author deliberately delivers the theme by showing Ulrich and Georg’s relationship changing throughout the story whether or not the chance was positive or negative. He shows this theme by using many different literary devices specifically using how the setting affects the mood, situational irony, and some important external conflicts.
The author creates the mood of the entire story by using how the weather changes throughout. It first starts as a snowy and windy night in a forest near some mountains: “In a forest of mixed growth somewhere on the eastern spur of the Carpathians a man stood winter night watching and listening” (Saki 189). This quote literally describes the weather the night the rivals meet. It shows that the night is dark and windy, making it hard to see or hear, and it sets an eerie mood because you know something is going to happen that night, ending their generation-long

When they met in the clearing, the silence was broken by a tree: “A fierce shriek of the storm had been answered by a splitting crash over their heads, a mass of tree had thundered down on them” (Saki 190). This beech tree crashes on them, pinning them down, leaving Georg and Ulrich forcing them to either stay silent while they wait for the men they had brought along, or chat while they were waiting. When the tree falls on them, the suspense starts rising because the chance to resolve the conflict is slowly slipping away, but in the end, they still manage to become friends, while pinned down and severely