Theme in Once Upon a Time by Nadine Gordimer

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Nadine Gordimer’s “Once Upon a Time”-Theme In Nadine Gordimer’s “Once Upon a Time”, the most important element is its theme. The entire story is set about telling its readers that human beings create their own destruction. The setting of the two parts of the story is important in first part setting is at night and the author( a woman) is all alone and in the second part people are afraid of colored people (black people)out of town who maybe attack them and ruin their lives. Suspense also add to the final effect when we are not sure if the burglars out of city will attack or not. All this is brought together to leave readers shocked, ready to rethink the importance of things in their own lives. The story begins with the author presenting a situation in which great fear exists. She hears a noise and is afraid of a burglar or murder inside her house. However, she soon comes to realize that her fear was not something real, but that the noise causing her fear was really just the shifting of the earth. The setting is important here in creating an atmosphere of dread which each human has experienced at one time in their life. It pulls the reader into the story so that when the second part hits, the reader is completely engaged in the author’s sardonic telling of a fairy tale. When author starts to tell second part of her story a happy family in a "perfect" little suburb makes it like a story for children, but by the story goes forward it completely changes and at the end readers left shocked! By story goes everything parents do to protect their home and family become useless, the gate speaker is used boy for a walki- talkit , the alarm is set off but no one cares, the high wall is mocked by the cat jumping over it. The final destruction which all those safeguards that characters thought they would die without instead took their baby from them is
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