The Moment Before the Gun Went Off

The tragic premise of the story, in which a white farmer accidentally kills his Black son, illuminates the evils of apartheid-era South Africa. Throughout most of the story, it appears to readers that Van der Vyver, a white Afrikaner farmer, has killed a Black farmhand named Lucas during a game drive. Only in the last line of the story does Gordimer reveal that Lucas “was not the farmer’s boy; he was his son” (Paragraph 16). This ironic ending recontextualizes all the information that came before, compounding The Dehumanizing Nature of Racism already made evident in the main character’s perception of the world.

Gordimer uses the literary device of perspective to situate the reader in the uncomfortable psychology of a representative pro-apartheid figure, introducing from the start The Importance of Perception. The role of perspective is critical throughout the short story, forcing the reader to reckon with how racism can warp every aspect of a racist man’s reality.

On one level, Gordimer illustrates the importance of perception to maintaining existing systems of power: the way in which others perceive those in power affects their capacity to sustain that power.