Nadine Gordimer's short story "Six Feet of the Country"

An analysis of Nadine Gordimer’s short story

 Six Feet of the Country

By Isaiah Cabanero

          As narrated in the short story “Six Feet of the Country” by Nadine Gordimer: “We bought our place, ten miles out of Johannesburg on one of the main roads, to change something in ourselves, I suppose; you seem to rattle about so much with a marriage like ours. You long to hear nothing but a deep satisfying silence when you sound a marriage. The farm hasn’t managed that for us, of course, but it has done other things, unexpected, illogical.”

          Upon these lines that, in part, opened the story, in some way, presents the state of mind of the protagonist in the story, the narrator, himself a married white man, living as master or baas (a South African term for “boss” or “master”) in his farm a few miles out of the city of Johannesburg in South Africa; and these may as very well present the ultimate thesis of the short story itself. To simply put things out, solely based on those opening lines, a “change” must have been sought, so a “search” or “journey” to a far away is supposed and is set foot for this “change”, and whether or not that “change” sought was found in the far away indeed, all that is just clear and known here is the fact, rooted from the narrator’s testimony, that the “search” brought about other things: things unexpected and things illogical. ...

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