Six Feet Of The Country By Nadine Gordimer Summary !!top!! 〈Full →〉

The Unbridgeable Divide: A Look at Nadine Gordimer’s "Six Feet of the Country"

Nadine Gordimer, the South African Nobel Prize laureate, had a unique gift for exposing the quiet, devastating fractures of a society built on apartheid. She didn't always need grand political speeches or violent protests to make her point. Instead, she often used the intimate, domestic interactions between white employers and Black employees to show how systemic racism corrodes the human soul.

Her short story, "Six Feet of the Country," is a masterclass in this approach. It is a story about death, bureaucracy, and the literal and metaphorical distances between people. If you’ve ever wondered how a simple funeral can become a political act, this story is the answer.

Here is a summary and analysis of this poignant tale.

Suggested avenues for further research (brief)

• A close linguistic study of the story’s legal and administrative vocabulary and how it functions rhetorically.
• Comparative analysis with Gordimer’s other apartheid-era stories to trace evolving strategies of moral critique.
• Reception history: how the story was read within and outside South Africa in the 1950s and how interpretations have shifted since.

Bibliography (select)

• Gordimer, Nadine. “Six Feet of the Country.” [Primary text]
• Critical works on Gordimer and apartheid-era literature (e.g., scholarship by J.M. Coetzee, Christopher Wagstaff, Homi Bhabha on race and representation)
• Theoretical texts on bureaucracy and dehumanization (e.g., Max Weber, Hannah Arendt)

If you want, I can expand any section into a full-length essay (e.g., 2,500–4,000 words) with direct textual quotes and line-by-line close reading.

Nadine Gordimer’s "Six Feet of the Country" examines the dehumanizing impact of apartheid through the story of a Black migrant worker's brother whose death is treated as a bureaucratic, rather than human, tragedy. The narrative highlights the profound injustice of the system when Petrus’s family is left with the wrong body and loses their life savings, illustrating the devaluation of Black life under the regime.

Read more about this short story on literary analysis websites. six feet of the country by nadine gordimer summary

Six Feet of the Country " by Nadine Gordimer is a 1956 short story that critiques the apartheid system in South Africa. It follows a wealthy white couple who, despite living on a peaceful rural farm, find themselves entangled in the cold, indifferent bureaucracy of racial oppression. Summary of the Plot Six Feet of the Country Summary and Study Guide

Introduction

Nadine Gordimer’s short story “Six Feet of the Country” (first published 1956) explores how apartheid-era South African racial hierarchies deform private life, grief, and human dignity. Set on a farm where a Black laborer’s sudden death confronts a white Afrikaner couple with institutionalized expectations and personal anxieties, the story compresses political critique, psychological realism, and moral ambiguity into a tightly controlled narrative. This paper analyzes Gordimer’s thematic concerns, narrative techniques, character dynamics, symbolism, and ethical implications, arguing that the story stages both a critique of apartheid’s social machinery and a probe into how systemic injustice becomes internalized and reproduced by ordinary people.

Part 3: The Bureaucratic Quest for the Body

Petrus comes to the narrator again. This time, his request is different. He explains that in his tribal custom (the story vaguely suggests he is Xhosa or a similar group), it is essential for a person to be buried in the soil of his home, not in a strange, foreign place like the town’s pauper’s grave. The family has sent money from the reserves. Petrus wants to retrieve Johannes’s body—or at least have it exhumed—so that it can be transported back home for a proper burial. All he needs is the narrator’s help: a letter, a car, a voice of authority. The Unbridgeable Divide: A Look at Nadine Gordimer’s

The narrator, still feeling a mix of guilt and annoyance, reluctantly agrees to help. What follows is a Kafkaesque journey through the bureaucratic labyrinth of apartheid South Africa.

• The Police: They are told that the body has already been buried in a “native grave” in a designated area. The police sergeant is friendly but unhelpful. He says that exhumation requires a permit, and only the native commissioner can issue it.
• The Native Commissioner’s Office: This is the heart of the state’s power over black lives. The commissioner, a stereotypical petty bureaucrat, is initially amused by the request. He explains that exhuming a body is a complicated legal matter. It requires a certificate from the medical officer of health, an order from the magistrate, and a fee for the grave-diggers. He looks at the narrator with a condescending smile. “You see,” he says, “it’s not so easy. These people don’t understand.”
• The Medical Officer of Health: This official is even more dismissive. He points out that the body was buried in a common grave with several other bodies, wrapped only in a blanket. To find Johannes’s remains, they would have to dig up the entire trench. He asks the narrator, “Do you have any idea what a body looks like after five days in this climate?” He refuses to issue the certificate.

The narrator returns to Petrus with the bad news. He tries to explain the medical officer’s reasoning. Petrus listens silently, his face expressionless. Then he says, quietly, “He said he would come back. He said he would not stay here.” Petrus is referring to a promise Johannes made before he died—a promise to return home.

Major Themes and Analysis

Historical and Social Context

• Apartheid South Africa (legally formalized after 1948) enforced strict racial segregation and control over Black South Africans’ movement, work, and bodies. Gordimer, writing within this context, foregrounds everyday enactments of those regulations—passbooks, police authority, and the normalization of Black laborers’ disposability.
• The story reflects mid-20th-century power relations on white-owned farms: white farmers’ dependence on Black laborers, paternalistic attitudes, and legal mechanisms (police, magistrates) that dehumanize Black subjects.

Part 2: The Denial and the Death

The narrator is irritated. He is tired after a long day, and he views Petrus’s request as an inconvenience. He does not want to get involved. He coldly informs Petrus that he cannot issue a pass; only the native commissioner can do that. He tells Petrus to take his brother to the "kaffer doctor" (a derogatory term for a traditional healer), as that is “good enough for them.” Petrus persists, pleading that his brother is coughing blood and is very ill, but the narrator dismisses him. In a moment of self-justification, the narrator later tells his wife that the rules are the rules, and if he started issuing passes for every sick relative, he would be overrun. A close linguistic study of the story’s legal

A few days later, the narrator learns from a neighbor that a dead African was found in a shed on the couple’s property. The body is that of Johannes. He died of pneumonia, alone, in the cold night. The narrator feels a flicker of guilt but quickly suppresses it. His primary emotion is anger: at the inconvenience, at the “mess,” and at Petrus for allowing his sick brother to be brought onto the property. He tells his wife, “Why the hell couldn’t he have died somewhere else?”

Petrus is grief-stricken. The narrator’s wife is horrified by her husband’s callousness, but she does nothing to intervene. The local police are called, and the body is taken away by the municipal “native burial” service.