Skip to main content

What can you infer about what Gordimer leaves unstated at the end of her story?

One inference that can be made from the ending of Gordimer's "Once Upon a Time" is that the parents recognize their mistakes.


At the end of the story, Gordimer leaves the family's reactions unstated.  She does not delve into what the mother and father thought as they carried "the bleeding mass" of their son into the house.   One inference that can be made is that the parents realized their folly regarding all of their security measures.  


Throughout the story, Gordimer describes the family as scared of the outside world. They enact security measures such as the gate, the wall, and the barbed wire thicket to keep the outside world away from them. However, when their child is destroyed by these measures, we can infer that the parents would reflect on their actions. They would have to rethink the world they have created. The desire to keep the family safe had the opposite consequence.  It endangered their boy, the love of their lives because as he crawls inside the coiled barbed wire, he "screamed and struggled deeper into its tangle."  


Gordimer shows the parents extracting their son and bringing him inside.  She does not state their thoughts to this painful reality.  We can infer that the parents would have to reconsider their fears of the outside world.  Their fears have essentially killed their son.  This can be an inference based on what is offered at the end of "Once Upon a Time."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more