Compose a 1750 words essay on The Encounter: Meeting, Barriers, and the Fundamental Narcissism in Human. Needs to be plagiarism free!Download file to see previous pages... The short stories “A Famil

Compose a 1750 words essay on The Encounter: Meeting, Barriers, and the Fundamental Narcissism in Human. Needs to be plagiarism free!

The short stories “A Family Supper” and “Encounter” both deal with encounters between distant people: in “A Family Supper,” a man returns to his home in Japan from a foray into America, while “Encounter” details a strange interaction between a Norwegian fisherman and a traveling bookseller he meets along the way. Both of these stories express three inherent elements of an encounter: the desire amongst its participants to come to some kind of understanding or communion, that understanding coming only after overcoming real and intense barriers, and the encounter only being real when internalized by one of its participants, who then treats the other as a part of his or her life rather than a fully fledged individual. Both “A Family Supper” and “Encounter” show people that have some intense desire to understand each other more deeply. ...

The family also shows a desire to understand each other even when it means asking uncomfortable questions: the son, when hearing that a father’s friend committed suicide, taking his entire family with him, he fears that his father might see this as acceptable. To understand his father’s thinking, he asks him the uncomfortable question “you think what he did – it was a mistake?” to which the father replies “Why of Course. Do you see it otherwise?” (344). This is a surprisingly frank discourse, and one that must have taken a great deal of effort between two people who have a “strained” relationship (338), but both participants are willing to partake in it in order to understand each other. One of the encounter’s basic elements is a desire by two people, separated in some way to come to understand each other further, and put some effort into this understanding. In “Encounter,” it is less clear why the protagonist wants to understand the person he has an encounter with. It is strongly implied that it might be simple curiosity – that the man, Arvid, had a limited world view and the sight of a “black man” on his small back road, driving a moped, which, to Arvid’s knowledge there was only one of on the island, “his [Arvid’s]” might have inspired too much of a curious circumstance to pass up (Jacobsen 346). Whatever the reason for it, there Arvid still demonstrates an almost insatiable desire to understand the other person in this encounter. So much so that Arvid turns his truck around, wasting what would presumably be precious time, in order to run down the “black man” and have a conversation with him (347).