Relationships with Strangers

Our theme for this week was relationships with strangers.  We read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and David Sedaris’ “Jesus Shaves.”  The narrators of these two stories both treat the strangers they meet very differently.  In Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” the people living in the town treat the winged man very badly.  They throw old food scraps and fruit peels at him and someone even pokes him with a hot brand.  The people in this story do not seem to care very much that this man may be an angel or a person that they should respect.  Instead, they treat him like an animal or a piece of property.  In Sedaris’ “Jesus Shaves,” however, the narrator interacts peacefully with the strangers he meets in his French class.  The students in the class have many different ideas and traditions from one another, but they are not cruel to each other about it.  Instead, they just disagree civilly and must accept that their traditions and culture may seem very strange to some people from other backgrounds.  Despite how different these stories are, I really enjoyed reading both of them and learning more about how and why some people act the way they do around strangers.