The Moment Before The Gun Went Off Sparknotes

Nadine Gordimer’s “The Moment before the Gun Went Off,” at face-value, is an obvious critique of the Apartheid situation that occurred in South Africa in the latter half of the twentieth century. Her use of a biased narrator helps portray this concept easily. What is less obvious, until the twist ending, is that she is also making a point about how easy it is for people to rush to judgment without having all of the facts. Upon revealing that the man who was shot (Lucas) is actually the illegitimate son of the main character, Marais Van der Vyver, Nadine Gordimer essentially says to the reader, “Next time, don’t be so quick to pick sides.” With great assistance from her twist ending, Gordimer uses “The Moment before the Gun Went Off” as a vehicle
The “facts” that can be spread through news agencies, whether via newspapers or more modern outlets, still go through humans who may or may not have their own hidden agendas. Again speaking through the narrator, Gordimer presents a nugget of truth from the mouth of a bigot: “The papers at home will quote the story as it has appeared in the overseas press, and in the back-and-forth he and the black man will become those crudely-drawn figures on anti-apartheid banners, units in statistics of white brutality against the blacks quoted at the United Nations—he, whom they will gleefully be able to call ‘leading member’ of the ruling Party.” Though Gordimer uses the narrator to present this view, it seems as though she is making a commentary on the filters through which news is spread. She is pointing out obvious biases that most humans hold by showcasing how the media will make their point by highlighting Van der Vyver’s affiliations with the pro-apartheid party. In knowing that Lucas is, in fact, the son of Marais Van der Vyver, the reader can go back and see that the messages of the anti-apartheid movement, based on this specific incident, would indeed be propaganda, because it doesn’t know the full story and
For example, at one point she has the narrator mention, “It has already happened that infiltrators from over the border have mined remote farm roads, killing white farmers and their families out on their own property for a Sunday picnic.” She sets this mood, and again uses an unreliable narrator to do so, as a means of putting the more sensitive of her readers in a mindset of not trusting the narrator. However, once it is revealed that the man who was shot, Lucas, was in fact the son of Marais Van der Vyver, the reader is forced to reconsider everything they have thought prior to knowing that fact. In doing so, she makes commentary on the importance of knowing all of the details of an event before passing judgment, a lesson that is still relevant to this