Family Unit: Once Upon a Time

"Once Upon a Time"
Nadine Gordimer

In this dark parody of a bedtime story, Gordimer uses allusion and irony to establish a theme: one should connect with instead of blocking out others if one desires safety.

In the opening scene of the story, the narrator fears that a burglar or murderer has entered her house.  Even though the source of the creaking isn't a confirmed murderer, the narrator realizes that the source of the creaking comes from the hollowing of the earth that created the potential conflict between the narrator and a murderer. In the narrator's country (South Africa, for those who neglected to read the background information), a large segment of the nation's poor, once used as cheap labor, have been rioting, burglarizing, and murdering as a result of the years of exploitation.  This allusion to real abuses lays the groundwork for the story's theme to develop.

After the allusion had been established, Gordimer focused on a major irony in the story of the family:  instead of building a wall to keep the rioters out, the family built a barrier to keep the family stuck inside the home.  The final stage of the fence is described with sinister connotation: "It as the ugliest but the most honest in its suggestion of the pure concentration-camp style, no frills, all evident efficacy" (Gordimer, 235).  While the family exerted all of its energy to protect the home from the outside world, they ended up creating a wall that shut them in their own world.  In the end, the family never encountered a single rioter; the boy's tragedy lay in his parents' isolationist designs.

If the family had responded to the conflicts of the allusion with a more accepting approach, the parents could have avoided becoming the harm they so desperately tried to avoid.