The Moment Before The Gun Went Off Short Story

The Black Man Outside and the White Man Inside the Cab

Jump and other stories is an omnibus of short fictions written in 1991 by a female, white South African writer Nadine Gordimer. The story takes place in the Republic of South Africa before the Apartheid ended. In the chapter “The Moment Before the Gun Went Off,” the story of a white farmer accidentally shooting a black farm boy, exemplifies a society in which a conflict between the white South African and black South African intensifies. In the end of this chapter, it presents an unexpected ending that the shot black boy is actually a son of the white farmer; however, until then, the Gordimer has a narrator represents the black South Africans and the white South Africans in a biased manner.

She exemplifies the white farming community as a sympathetic group for the protagonist, Marias Van der Vyver, that “understand how he must feel” and who “see the truth” (Gordimer,1992, p.106). These implies the whites’ interpretation that suites on their purpose to justify themselves. They are turning away from the fact that one of the men from their community killed a black boy, but still give understanding to the accident and behave as if they actually take in the situation of the murder. The social background is, as mentioned previously, before apartheid ended; therefore, the white South Africans were segregating the black South Africans unreasonably; this scene exemplifies the inequality within the society in South Africa then. On the contrary, Gordimer explains the blacks as the group “who want to destroy the white man’s power” (Gordimer, 1992, p.106) who would use the incident “in their boycott and divestment campaigns” (Gordimer ,1992, p.105). The black South Africans see through the incident as a resentful event which “will be another piece of evidence in their truth about the country.” (Gordimer, 1992, p.105). The black South Africans have been offended with unjustified segregation and

Both of them are depicted in a different light with the objective to show the stereotypes of each group. Nadine Gordimer has the narrator describe the black women as: young but of course pregnant, has “jutting belly” and “start bearing children at puberty”. (Gordimer, 1992, p.109) These characteristics imply the stereotypes and bias that the whites had against the South African blacks. They look down on their young-age pregnancy since most of the young pregnancy refers to the uneducated or poverty. In contrast, the white wife of the protagonist is depicted as “always supportive” (Gordimer, 1992, p.109) and lives in a secured house with “a high barbed security fence”. (Gordimer, 1992, p.108) This is an indication of the superiority and the sincerity of the whites that most of them supposedly possessed at that time. Gordimer represents the women from two groups using these comparisons for it can demonstrate both stereotypes and the mind-set of the white South African, considering that these can be the factor that casts light on the milieu of South Africa