What was the Name of the Narrator Again?

That's right, it's time to talk about Nadine Gordimer's writing, and that includes her habit of not naming her characters and especially her narrators.

Of Gordimer's unnamed narrators in the three stories that we read, I found the woman in Amnesty the easiest to identify with. Let us call her the Woman. Gordimer intended for the Woman to be easy to identify with because she didn't name the character: the Woman is meant to be every woman. But I think there was more to it than that. Both the narrator of Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants and Six Feet of the Country are by my standards extremely racist. I was raised to believe that racism is a very bad thing, and so it's difficult to align myself with the Gordimer's racist narrators. The Woman in Amnesty is not racist. Furthermore she has beautiful thoughts. An example of this is when the Woman's perspective husband (the Man) is sent away to an island prison. She tries to image the place where he is, but she's never seen the ocean. "But I have never seen the sea except to colour it in blue at school, and I couldn't imagine a piece of earth surrounded by it." I there are many reasons to feel sorry for the Woman: the father of her child is in prison, and when he gets out of prison the Man treats her as a child and not as an adult. But out of all these big reasons, I pitied the Woman for a little reason: she has never seen the sea. And when she attempted her trip to the Island I was delighted as the Woman saw the ocean. "And there it was- there was the sea. It was green and blue, climbing and falling, bursting white, all the way to the sky." It's easy to sit inside this woman's head and watch her beautiful thoughts.

Although I learned about apartheid in highschool when I read Cry, the Beloved Country, I haven’t really thought about the possibility of white men getting lost in the system. It was strange to think about Gordimer's Six Feet of the Country in which the narrator, a white man, is rendered powerless inside the beast that is apartheid. The system gives him power, how can he be powerless? Six Feet teaches me about the complexities of apartheid and racism. In my simplified brain, people who perpetrate racism and apartheid are committing evil acts against humanity. Gordimer is trying to tell me that they are only a tiny cog in the great machine; helping the machine to function because they are being turned by the machine.