Nadine Gordimer’s fiction is widely admired for laying bare how hierarchical structures of social power operate in everyday life. Through her character’s interactions, motivations, attitudes, and assumptions, Gordimer sketches a social landscape bounded by inequality and haunted by the active presence of injustice. In Gordimer’s South Africa, the segregation and oppression of the majority black…
Tag: Nadine Gordimer
Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants – Setting
‘‘Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants’’ first appeared in 1965 during a period of sweeping historical change in Africa. In the decades after World War II, the European powers that had dominated the continent gradually withdrew their colonial administrations as they faced increased opposition from armed liberation movements. In the year 1960 alone, seventeen African nations gained…
Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants – Literary Devices
Narration ‘‘Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants’’ is written in first-person as one individual’s account of her experiences. Because there is no objective or omniscient viewpoint, the narrator is the reader’s only source of information—the reader knows only what the narrator knows or chooses to tell. This narrative device enhances the sense of mystery surrounding the character…
Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants – Themes
Loneliness and Isolation The narrator of ‘‘Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants’’ is a middle-aged, working-class white woman who lacks a strong social network. She complains, with some justification, that her work in the petrol station does not afford her opportunities to develop friendships. She is prevented from befriending her co-workers as a result of being the…
Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants – Characters
Mrs. Douglas Mrs. Douglas is the proprietress of the New Park Hotel in Johannesburg, around the corner from the narrator’s home. The narrator mentions the hotel to the drifter when he is looking for a place to stay in town, and she goes with him to ask Mrs. Douglas for a room. Later, the narrator…
Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants – Summary
‘‘Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants’’ is written in the first person in everyday, colloquial language. The narrator appears to be telling a story, either directly to the reader or perhaps to an unknown third party. In the story’s opening paragraphs, the narrator, whose name is never mentioned, introduces herself as a bookkeeper of a petrol (gas)…
Town and Country Lovers – Analysis
In “Town and Country Lovers,” Gordimer sets up two dichotomies. The first is suggested in the title; there are two stories in two settings, both presenting interracial love affairs. The other dichotomy is between the men and women in the stories. The men are both members of the white ruling class, and the women are…
Town and Country Lovers – Summary
Part 1 “Town and Country Lovers” is a two-part story about interracial lovers who suffer the consequences of breaking the rules forbidding such relationships. In the first story, solitary geologist Dr. von Leinsdorf meets a young, colored (mixed-race) African girl who is a cashier at the grocery store across the street from his apartment. When…
Once Upon A Time by Nadine Gordimer – Analysis
At the heart of Gordimer’s ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ are two groups of people: the whites who live ‘‘in a suburb, in a city,’’ and the ‘‘people of another colour’’ who live elsewhere. In the story’s South Africa during the last years of the racial segregation policy known as apartheid, the differences between the groups…
Once Upon A Time by Nadine Gordimer – Setting – Apartheid
Apartheid In the late 1980s, as Gordimer was writing and publishing ‘‘Once Upon a Time,’’ forty years of official racial segregation in South Africa were coming to an end. For many decades, the black population, which made up about 80 percent of the population, had been oppressed by a white minority, who made up about…