Strangers: Friend or Foe?

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Recommended: Social factors influencing interpersonal relationships

As we humans go through out life, we are forced to interact in a world full of people. We quite often speak and do business with complete strangers and don’t give a second thought about what they did or said in that exchange of pleasantries. There are many stories such as Merimee’s Mateo Falcone, Street’s Grains of Paradise, and Tunis’s His Enemy, His Friend that focus on these brief encounters and how it can affect one’s feelings, thoughts, and ultimately actions. I believe that short and concise interactions with complete strangers can affect how a person thinks and acts.
Little Fortunato was faced with a brief encounter in Merimee’s Mateo Falcone and the affect on him was quite drastic. Fortunato is confronted and told by Gianetto Saupiero to, “Hide me, for I can go no farther”(25). Young Fortunato has to make the decision to either hide the criminal or let him get caught. The decision that Fortunato makes because of this brief encounter ultimately becomes his downfall and gets him killed. In the beginning of the story Fortunato was “tranguilly stretched out in the sun”(24). Ha...

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