Nadine Gordimer's a Chip of Glass Ruby
Nadine Gordimer’s Six Feet of the Country
As active in the anti-apartheid system, Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer who was born in 1923, doesn’t stop bombarding the apartheid system in most of her works which deal with the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country. She was a founding member of congress of South African writers and even at the height of the apartheid regime. A monster, apartheid, South Africa and racism were the most important elements which play a part in Gordimer’s collection of short stories called Six Feet of the Country that indirectly denounce a main dangerous trammel of that system. Teeming with a lexical register suggestive of a bleak gloomy mood, figures of speech, and many symbolic elements, the first story of Gordimer’s collection, Six Feet of the Country, chime in with the overarching theme of maltreatment of the blacks and the rejection of other. Within a story of a died man, not only barred from the right of immigration and working in a south African city, Johannesburg, but also prevented of being buried there after his death of pneumonia, the writer depicts the horribleness of the apartheid system and stresses the extend to which causes such discrimination huge hazards and social problems that lead even to a horrible death. A reader can find out that the theme is linked to darkness by merely spotting the dominant choking, devaluing words sprinkled over the pages of that story such as: “sadness, Sick, devils, fear, irritated, dead, cold, pneumonia, mourners, grave, funeral, coffin ect.”Such lexical register endows the story with a dreary mood and enhances the characters’ bad temper. In other term, the unfairness of the apartheid system and its dramatic effects are reflected in a sorrowful mood and mourning characters in this story. Gordimer, to elaborate her language and diction, is not limited only in choosing a lexical register coherent to the theme, but she also uses some figures
As active in the anti-apartheid system, Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer who was born in 1923, doesn’t stop bombarding the apartheid system in most of her works which deal with the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country. She was a founding member of congress of South African writers and even at the height of the apartheid regime. A monster, apartheid, South Africa and racism were the most important elements which play a part in Gordimer’s collection of short stories called Six Feet of the Country that indirectly denounce a main dangerous trammel of that system. Teeming with a lexical register suggestive of a bleak gloomy mood, figures of speech, and many symbolic elements, the first story of Gordimer’s collection, Six Feet of the Country, chime in with the overarching theme of maltreatment of the blacks and the rejection of other. Within a story of a died man, not only barred from the right of immigration and working in a south African city, Johannesburg, but also prevented of being buried there after his death of pneumonia, the writer depicts the horribleness of the apartheid system and stresses the extend to which causes such discrimination huge hazards and social problems that lead even to a horrible death. A reader can find out that the theme is linked to darkness by merely spotting the dominant choking, devaluing words sprinkled over the pages of that story such as: “sadness, Sick, devils, fear, irritated, dead, cold, pneumonia, mourners, grave, funeral, coffin ect.”Such lexical register endows the story with a dreary mood and enhances the characters’ bad temper. In other term, the unfairness of the apartheid system and its dramatic effects are reflected in a sorrowful mood and mourning characters in this story. Gordimer, to elaborate her language and diction, is not limited only in choosing a lexical register coherent to the theme, but she also uses some figures