30 pages • 1 hour read
Nadine GordimerThe Moment Before the Gun Went Off
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Rifle
The rifle represents the legacy of apartheid and the damage it causes to those affected by it. Handed down to Van der Vyver from his own father, the farmer doesn’t considered the gun dangerous. He figures that because “no one had used the rifle” since his father’s death, “it was not loaded” (Paragraph 9). This assumption corresponds to the potential logic of white South Africans: that the system of apartheid they inherited must not be dangerous, because it has existed untouched for so long. It is an accident that causes the rifle to fire and kill Lucas, nothing more. Van der Vyver sees this accident as an anomaly: he knows that he should not “ride with a loaded weapon in a vehicle” (Paragraph 9), as his father taught him, and he had not intended to; the shot was completely unintentional, caused by a pothole and Lucas banging the roof of the truck. For this reason, Lucas’s death is easier to justify as an accident, one in a long line of equal accidents that happen “every day of the week” (Paragraph 2). Nonetheless, the potential danger of the weapon turns into actual harm—much like apartheid policies.
Lucas’s Grave
Lucas’s grave symbolizes, in part, the mass “fear and pain” (Paragraph 12) that Black people in South Africa have long endured. The loaded moment when both the “dead man's mother and he [Van der Vyver] stare at the grave” is a moment of communication “like that between the black man outside and the white man inside the cab before the gun went off” (Paragraph 13). In this metaphor, the white man is in control, at the driver’s seat, and the Black man stands on the back of the truck, “spotting game before his employer did” (Paragraph 7). Related to The Importance of Perception, this metaphor captures how Black people, within racist systems, by right of their lived experience, can see things more clearly. Black children do not have the luxury of avoiding dark realities the way that white children do. Black adults mature faster with these traumas, as Lucas’s mother has.
Lucas’s grave also symbolizes the silence that has long surrounded these traumas. Though Lucas’s grandparents hold his mother “as if she were a prisoner or a crazy woman to be restrained […] she says nothing, does nothing” (Paragraph 13). The obliqueness of this reaction generates tension, prompting Van der Vyver to reassure himself that “there need be no fear that she will look up, at him” (Paragraph 13). Lucas’s grave calls to mind how the systems of power force Black people to be complicit in hiding the abuses they endure. However, Van der Vyver’s anxiety, coupled with the intense silence of Lucas’s mother, hints at Impending Change to Power Structures.
The Newspaper Photograph
The newspaper photograph symbolizes the intense discomfort people often feel when they see an injustice being performed. In his press photos, Van der Vyver becomes unrecognizable, his face “strangely opened by distress” when he usually “hides any change of expression” (Paragraph 2). Looking at it makes viewers feel they “had stared in on some room where [they] should not be” (Paragraph 2). The same can be said for South Africa as a whole under apartheid; the intensity of the pain and inequality was such that many people could not confront it head-on. Taken another way, the evils of apartheid could only be seen accurately—like Van der Vyver’s face—after a major disruption took place. In South Africa’s case, the disruption is coming in the form of boycotts, divestments, and UN statistics, which are forcing South Africans to look upon the true state of their country.
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By Nadine Gordimer
