The Moment Before the Gun Went Off

By forcing the reader to inhabit the mind of a deeply racist main character, one embedded in an equally racist community, Gordimer forces the reader to face the dehumanizing nature of racism. The mundanity of the racism that permeates Van der Vyver’s self-centered thoughts speaks to the insidious strength of that dehumanization. Gordimer, by extension, points out how embedded the dehumanization of Black people is in her society under the system of apartheid.

Racism shapes Van der Vyver’s priorities. Van der Vyver may have wept at the police station. But if that moment of grief was purely for the death of his son, which is a generous assumption, his thoughts for the rest of the story center on his concerns for the preservation of his own status and power. He is consumed with pity for himself. His community re-enforces these conclusions. It is “[b]ad enough to have killed a man” (Paragraph 3); the real tragedy at hand, though, is that this accident will aid “the Party’s, the government’s, the country’s enemies” (Paragraph 3). Those community members who call with condolences, they refer to the death of the young man as “‘that business’ with one of Ven der Vyver’s boys” (Paragraph 11).