Once Upon a Time- Nadine Gordimer

"Once Upon a Time"
Nadine Gordimer

This story was a little strange, but slightly more interesting than the first one.  I want to answer one of the questions from the book because I just liked it.  Number two asks about the elements that contribute to the sense of a child's story.  First, I noticed the terms "you have been warned" (Gordimer, page 233) and "happily every after," which was mentioned numerous times throughout the passage.  These relate her story to all the stories we read and were told as children which included similar phrases.  Gordimer also included descriptions of the characters in the story as "wise old witch" and "prince."  The story also contradicts the thoughts of the original narrator, as she thought about getting security systems, and the mother and father in the story did what she wished she'd done.  The title further contributes to the theme of the story because "once upon a time" is one of the most common phrases found in children's stories.  Like most stories, there is also a mythical creature--in this case, a dragon.  The last page of the story also contains the phrase "sleeping beauty" to describe the scene in which the son, pretending to save a girl, tries to climb across the fence.  That scene was very weird and seemed to be completely out of the ordinary for this text.