“Once Upon A Time”
By: Nadine Gordimer
Sightlines 9
The story “Once upon a time” by Nadine Gordimer, follows the pattern of a fairy tale but it does not have a happily ever after ending. The characters involved are a mother, a father and a little boy, and an evil step mother that was referred to as a witch. They lived in an almost perfect city and they had everything they ever needed and wanted. Anyway, the evil step mother that was kind of like a witch gave the family money to build the horrible contraption of a fence. She said that they needed it to keep out the scary and negative things in their city. At first they just had a security system with signs to warn trespassers, but then they came to realize the error in their ways so they went to the extremes of buying barbed wire to put on top of their already great fence. So their almost perfect house turned into what looked like a prison. Then one fateful day the little boy was playing the prince that saves the princess and he decided to play in the fence because it was sharp like the “thicket” of thorns that the prince had to brave in the story. In the finish he ended up reaching his conclusion as he mangled horribly in the metal contraption that was a fence it looked like a big metal thing with circular wires on the top. The moral of the story is don’t try to protect yourself too much because you will end up only hurting yourself and others around you that you love, very much.
The fences in the story “Once Upon A Time” are meant to keep out the poor and homeless people. In “The Ring of General Macias” by Josephina Niggli the house in which the play is set is like a fence, shielding the garden patio from the revolutionists.
Also in the story “once upon a time”, all the rich people are worried about keeping out the negative things. The little boy died because they were trying to protect their belongings so much that the security devices meant to keep him safe killed him in the end because he played in them for fun. The boy didn’t know any better because he was sheltered from the world. It was kind of like Andres de la O and Cleto going to General Macias’s house because they didn’t know that they would be killed. They thought they would be safe.
In conclusion, the stories are alike because while the characters were trying to save either themselves or someone else, someone ended up getting hurt or killed in the end.
This would be the patio which would be in the interior surrounded by the hacienda itself. The outside would be like a fence to keep out the poor.
This would be the fence in the story “once upon a time” it was made out of barbed wire so the poor couldn’t get into the yard in which the house was placed.