Fear Itself
"Once Upon A Time" is a short story written by Nadine Gordimer about a family living "happily ever after" in a South African all-white neighborhood. While the story starts out with the narrator hearing a bump in the night, it leads to the tale of a bedtime story to calm the narrator down. Throughout the story it is hinted that the country outside the safe walls of the family's home is chaotic. The story also covers points like racism, fear, self-imprisonment. The story also parallels children stories in multiple ways. In the end, the family’s uncontrolled fear gets the better of them and results in the death of their son (Gordimer). This tragic conclusion is the author’s way of showing what can result from unchecked fear in an environment …show more content…
While the parents are constantly in fear and setting up more walls, the son treats every line of defense with disregard because he doesn’t know what they’re for. He uses their front gate intercom as a walkie-talkie, ignores the intruder alarm like everyone else, and in the end, doesn’t understand the purpose of barbed wire (Gordimer). In the end, the parents themselves begin to ignore their defenses and take them for granted. The way they ignore their own defenses is reflective of how they ignore the problems within their society. Instead of trying to help the people begging for food and jobs, they chose to build walls between them. Instead of stopping for a moment and thinking about how to truly solve the problems they were facing, they let fear take control. Fear told them to choose the quickest “solution” time and time again, and all this led to was the reality brought to them by the death of their …show more content…
The only choice that humanity has, is how much control we give to our fear. The family in “Once Upon A Time” let their entire lives be dictated by fear, and it resulted in the loss of what they treasured most. Fear caused the parents to fail to perform their most basic duties. They overlooked their duty as parents to teach their son about the reality of the world they lived in. They hid from their duty as citizens to act against the wrongdoings of their country. In the end, they failed humanity by ignoring their duty to help others who have had their most basic freedoms stripped away. They chose to allow fear to take everything from them, instead of using it to make changes for the better. In the words of Franklin Roosevelt, “…the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into
"Once Upon A Time" is a short story written by Nadine Gordimer about a family living "happily ever after" in a South African all-white neighborhood. While the story starts out with the narrator hearing a bump in the night, it leads to the tale of a bedtime story to calm the narrator down. Throughout the story it is hinted that the country outside the safe walls of the family's home is chaotic. The story also covers points like racism, fear, self-imprisonment. The story also parallels children stories in multiple ways. In the end, the family’s uncontrolled fear gets the better of them and results in the death of their son (Gordimer). This tragic conclusion is the author’s way of showing what can result from unchecked fear in an environment …show more content…
While the parents are constantly in fear and setting up more walls, the son treats every line of defense with disregard because he doesn’t know what they’re for. He uses their front gate intercom as a walkie-talkie, ignores the intruder alarm like everyone else, and in the end, doesn’t understand the purpose of barbed wire (Gordimer). In the end, the parents themselves begin to ignore their defenses and take them for granted. The way they ignore their own defenses is reflective of how they ignore the problems within their society. Instead of trying to help the people begging for food and jobs, they chose to build walls between them. Instead of stopping for a moment and thinking about how to truly solve the problems they were facing, they let fear take control. Fear told them to choose the quickest “solution” time and time again, and all this led to was the reality brought to them by the death of their …show more content…
The only choice that humanity has, is how much control we give to our fear. The family in “Once Upon A Time” let their entire lives be dictated by fear, and it resulted in the loss of what they treasured most. Fear caused the parents to fail to perform their most basic duties. They overlooked their duty as parents to teach their son about the reality of the world they lived in. They hid from their duty as citizens to act against the wrongdoings of their country. In the end, they failed humanity by ignoring their duty to help others who have had their most basic freedoms stripped away. They chose to allow fear to take everything from them, instead of using it to make changes for the better. In the words of Franklin Roosevelt, “…the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into