price, causing his wife to feel humiliated and isolated from him. At first, this story may not seem to deal with the racial problems specific to South Africa—after all, oppressed and impoverished people are taken advantage of the world over. But the inequality that permeates South African society is depicted in the shared humiliation of the old black man and the young white woman. Gordimer explained this relationship in an interview: the young woman "suffered from seeing her husband or lover demean himself by falling into this black-white cliche of beating down the African.... She suffered really from seeing herself demeaned through her lover."

The woman identifies with the black carver and thus rejects, at least for the moment, the typical white world of South Africa. Gordimer achieves this emotional connection in part through symbolism. While she draws distinctions between the white world of the train and the black world of the station, she implies that the black world is more honest. The whites live in a fragile world of their own construction symbolized by the train. Before they buy the blacks' wares, the whites require them to act "like performing animals, the better to exhibit the fantasy held towards the faces on the train." Though the black world is filled with "mud huts," "barefoot children," and "a garden in which nothing grew," it is still shown as a place of community. This is in contrast this with the passengers on the train with their "caged faces'' and who are "boxed in.'' They are willing to donate items to the poor children outside but only those they do not value, such as the chocolate that "wasn't very nice."

Such an incident illustrates the unfruitful match between the young man and woman on the train. The couple, presumably on their honeymoon, have been caught up in "the unreality of the last few weeks.'' They have bought many animal carvings during their travels, and the young woman wonders how they will fit in at home. The buck, hippos, and elephants (and later, the lion), all ferocious or frightening animals, stand in opposition to the refined world she and her husband inhabit. But after seeing her husband act in such an insensitive, exploitative manner toward the old black man, she knows that nothing she has recently acquired is in harmony with her life and values. Her husband, however, confronted with the dichotomy of the white and black worlds of South African has no problem accepting it.

The emptiness she feels at this realization of the differences between them fills her with a "weariness" and "tastelessness." The woman has felt this way before, but she has mistakenly thought "it was something to do with singleness, with being alone and belonging too much to oneself.'' The incident at the train station makes her painfully aware that this "void" has been caused by her alliance with her husband, who argues with an impoverished old vendor "for fun." Yet she does not voice these frustrations to him. Though the woman does not want to have anything to associate with this emptiness, so that "no object, word or sight...might recur and so recall the feeling,'' it will clearly not be possible to ignore their basic incompatibility in the future. The man's failure to understand his wife's unspoken signals reveals their fundamental inability to communicate. Thus, he misses "the occasion for loving."

In addition to developing the theme of sterile love through her characters' actions towards one another, Gordimer also uses sexual imagery and symbolism. As the story begins, the train entering the station represents the potential for a healthy relationship. The train represents the man; it "[flares] out.... Creaking, jerking... gasping, the train fills the station." The woman is the station, whose tracks "[flare] out to let it in." But, like the doubts that have been lurking in the back of the young woman's mind, there are hints of the impending division: the train behind the engine is a "dwindling body"; the train calls out "I'm coming" but receives "no answer.'' The sexual promise of the relationship is snuffed out by the husband's purchase of the lion. As the train leaves the station, the young woman then feels the "impotence of anger," and the "heat of shame [mounts] through her legs." Finally, the train casts "the station like a skin." Once again it calls "I'm coming," and receives no reply. Thus, through this metaphor, Gordimer indicates the young couple's emotional estrangement.

Gordimer's reputation as a descriptive writer rests not on her portrayal of details such as eye color or hair color but in the layering of telling details. In the 1980s, Gordimer and photographer David Goldblatt collaborated on two books in which selections from her fiction were accompanied by his pictures. Andrew Vogel Ettin finds these artists to be well matched in their interest of social and physical environments. Goldblatt does not illustrate Gordimer's words per se but shows the backdrop against which her stories take place, Ettin draws particular attention to the final image of the couple in' "The Train from Rhodesia'' as an example of the "expressive power of the physical": "Smuts blew in grittily, settled on her hands. Her back remained at exactly the same angle, turned against the young man sitting with his hands drooping between his sprawled legs, and the lion, fallen on its side in the corner." This "caught moment" deserves its place as the pinnacle of the story. It includes many elements central to Gordimer's fiction: the intrusion of the white world of the train in the black world of the station, the separation of man and woman, and the chance for love destroyed by the racial problems of South Africa.

Source: Rena Korb, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

In one of the more insightful recent discussions of Nadine Gordimer's "The Train from Rhodesia," South African critic Robert Green writes in The Novels of Nadine Gordimer that the story "map[s] out the silence and asymmetry between black and white." There is much to recommend using these ideas of "silence" and "asymmetry" as points of departure into Gordimer's story. The building blocks Gordimer selects for her setting—the station, the train, and her principal characters—provide context essential to the story's action. If the silence between the domains of black and white is most evident in the unfolding of Gordimer's plot, it is in the construction of setting that the asymmetry Green remarks upon can be most clearly seen. Since the asymmetry between these domains generates the silence which mark their boundaries, it is here, with setting, that I shall begin.

Though it is impossible to date the story's action with certainty, it is reasonable to assume that it is set sometime between the closing years of the nineteenth century, when the first major train lines linking South Africa with countries to the north were built, and 1953. However, given the political events of the late 1940s and early 1950s, a later date seems more likely. The exact location of the station cannot be established with any certainty, but Gordimer's descriptions of the hot, arid, desert-like conditions suggest a setting on either the Little or Great Karoo (Khoisan for "desert") in the Cape Colony. Gordimer could, of course, have chosen to be more specific about the location and date if she had wished, but it is precisely the approximate nature of these details that gives her story the sense of an endlessly recurring cycle. It is worth observing that, although her other works generally provide very detailed scenes, here she furnishes only a few details about the station and the train. From Gordimer's description one might take away the impression that all of South Africa is similarly arid and empty, but this is not so. Though the country's interior is largely arid, the Eastern and Southern coast are as fertile, well-watered, pleasant and densely populated as the United States' Gulf Coast. Why, then, does she pick this location? Her decision to place the story's action in the Karoo is most probably both a strategic move and a practical necessity, for it is in locations such as this one that the disparity between the worlds of black and white are visible in their simplest, most direct relief. This is not to say that there is no disparity in coastal South Africa—the opposite was, and remains, the case—but rather, that the Karoo setting provides an ideal territory for a study in miniature of three tiers of South African society.

In this hierarchy, the polished, well-to-do English-speaking people appear both on top economically and as social transients on the landscape ("settler," with its implication of transience, is a term of insult to many South African whites). Their presence on the train therefore provides a setting which is both entirely plausible and a wonderfully ironic commentary on their presence on this landscape. Where the station is a study in degrees of poverty, the train is a demonstration of the world's opulence elsewhere, a caravan of delights from which the stationmaster's family is in exile, and from which the station's blacks are permanently excluded. This fact is mirrored spatially as well, with the passengers up high, reaching down to toss money or examine artifacts.

In a letter of November 5, 1899, a young Winston Churchill, on his way to report on the Boer War (1899-1902) wrote that "railway traveling in South Africa is more expensive but just as comfortable as in India. Lying-down accommodation is provided for all.... The sun is warm, and the air is keen and delicious. But the scenery would depress the most buoyant spirits.... with the daylight the train was in the middle of the Great Karoo. Wherefore was this miserable land of stone and scrub created?" Churchill's comments underscore the dichotomy between the harsh, unpleasant conditions outside on one hand, and the train's self-contained opulence on the other. From the perspective of the station, the train's call of "I'm coming" represents an unanswerable, false promise. At the story's end the train removes from the barren station everything it brought. Shedding the station like a snake sheds its used-up skin, it leaves behind only some bread, some pocket-change, an orange and some candies that are "not very nice.''

Gordimer provides little detail about the newly married couple beyond suggesting that they are honeymooning and that they are not themselves from southern Africa. The young wife's comments about "the unreality of the last few weeks," the difficulty of finding places "at home" to put the carvings and baskets they have thus far bought on their trip, and the changing meaning of these things "away from the places [she] found them" suggest that the honeymooners are not themselves Rhodesian, but are touring Africa and, like Churchill, will return to Britain when their honeymoon is over. (Rhodesia, which lies directly north of South Africa, was a British colony until November 12th, 1965. The name change to Zimbabwe took place in 1980.)

On the next rung down from the transients on the train is a somewhat cliched depiction of the stalwart Afrikaner family, carving out a niche from the unforgiving country. Like the principal characters the stationmaster remains nameless, but his social rank is nonetheless clearly identified. His uniform is rumpled and creased. His house is made of tin. A sheep carcass hangs in the verandah. His children wander around barefoot. His garden grows nothing. Taken together, these points mean to demonstrate that the stationmaster and his family are from the poorest part of South Africa's white working class, not coincidentally, the group in the most direct competition with blacks for unskilled positions. (David Harrison writes in The White Tribe of Africa that "between 1924 and 1933 the proportion of unskilled white workers on the railways rose from 9.5...to 39.9 % while the proportion of blacks fell from 75...to 48.9 %.")

At this early stage in her career Gordimer fails to get much closer to the station's black inhabitants than her heroine does. However, the details she provides from a distance demonstrate that their lives of unpleasant, undignified dependency are in as sharp a contrast to the relative well-being of the stationmaster and his family as they are to the idealized, mythical Africa they sell—the Africa of woven baskets, of carved buck, of "lions.. .grappling with strange, thin, elongated warriors who clutched spears and showed no fear." This is, in the protagonist's words, "the fantasy" of a world in balance, a world in which blacks live dignified lives in harmony with the world they inhabit, a world in which there is no asymmetry between hunter and hunted or between black and white. But beyond the fantasy they sell is a very different reality, one in which the black majority accommodate themselves however they can while they mourn, mythologize, and commercialize their heritage for British consumption. The station, then, is a self-contained economic world, consisting only of the stationmaster's house, a goods store, and an adjacent kraal. (Similar to "corral," the Afrikaans kraal also describes a small group of huts within the wall).

Together, these locations suggest an entirely artificial micro-economy, subject to the passing trains for continuance. The stationmaster and his wife buy goods to sell to the blacks living in the adjacent kraal. The blacks, in turn, have no recourse but to carve and weave artifacts to sell to train passengers in order to buy goods from the station-master's store. Until the arrival of this particular train, the system remains asymmetrical, static, timeless. This imbalance of power is the principal asymmetry from which all others arise. There is, without truly representative government, no mechanism to allow the blacks at the base of the economic pyramid to invert the structures of power and race, nor is there any incentive for the white minority to let go of their franchise and make the government representative.

The story's plot sets this stasis in motion. It details how an artfully carved lion reaches across the barriers of race, class and silence that separate the domains, of white and black South Africans—a disarmingly simple theme. However, this simple theme supports a complex and nuanced rising awareness on the part of the female protagonist. Ultimately, her rejection of her new husband powerfully demonstrates the impossibility of living "outside'' incompatible ideologies. Though the young woman is certainly not intentionally looking for opportunities to mingle with the natives, the old man smiles "not from the heart, but at the customer." His carving "speaks" to her in a different language, uncomfortably bridging the chasm of silence between the domains of black and white South Africa. Its mane"tellfs] you... that the artist had delight in the lion.'' It is this "delight,'' by the story's conclusion, that makes the young woman unable to quell her awareness of the humanity that she and the woodcarver share. The protagonist senses that a moral wrong has been done, but she is certainly unwilling, perhaps even unable, to understand the origin of her disquiet. In a pointed, ironic commentary on the relativity of values aesthetic systems, the woman is outraged, not because her husband meanly cheated another man out of a ridiculously small amount of change, but that he did so for a lion that was pretty, suggesting that the real victim is the undervalued artwork, not the old man standing by the railroad panting. (The lion's price, whether three-or one-and six shillings is ridiculously low by any standard. Gordimer underscores this by withholding the key word "shilling" until nearly the end of the story, inviting the reader to substitute the basic South African currency unit "rand" in its place.) So threatening are the possibilities in every direction—on one hand, that the carver is as human as she is; on the other, that she can no longer respect her husband—that the protagonist is gradually squeezed into a state of emotional paralysis. Handled by a ham-fisted author this approach would have led the protagonist to buy the lion, make more contact with the man, and reach back across the divide in sudden, blinding self-awareness. But Gordimer avoids such sentimentality, instead following her protagonist from the stasis of the external setting to the paralysis of limited self-awareness while leading the reader along the contours of race, class, and culture that defined South Africa at the outset of apartheid, and, to some measure, continue to define it today.

Source: David Kippen, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

After I had selected and arranged these stones, the present publisher asked me to provide some kind of introduction to them. If they were now making their first appearance I might have recoiled from this invitation, but they have all been printed and some reprinted, and have therefore been through a period of probation. Whatever I may say about them now cannot alter what has been said by others, and can hardly increase or lessen the likelihood of their being read—-that must depend on the stories themselves.

The words are William Plomer's, but the attitude comes so close to my own that I do not hesitate to fly his declaration at the masthead of this book. William Plomer not only wrote some stories that have become classic, he also had a special interest in and fascination with the short story as a form used in widely diverse ways by others. His code holds good forme; for all of us. I take it further; if the story itself does not succeed in conveying all the writer meant it should, no matter when he wrote it, neither explication nor afterthought can change this. Conversely, if the story has been achieved, the patronizing backward glance its writer might cast upon it, as something he could now do with one hand tied behind his back but no longer would care to do at all, will not detract from it.

I wrote these stories [in Selected Stories] over thirty years. I have attempted now to influence any reader's judgment of or pleasure in them only to the extent implied by the fact that I have chosen some and excluded others. In this sense, I suppose, I have 'rewritten': imposed a certain form, shaped by retrospect, upon the collection as an entity. For everything one writes is part of the whole story, so far as any individual writer attempts to build the pattern of his own perception out of chaos. To make sense of life: that story, in which everything, novels, stories, the false starts, the half-completed, the abandoned, has its meaningful place, will be complete with the last sentence written before one dies or imagination atrophies. As for retrospect as a valid critique, I realize it has no fixed existence but represents my own constantly changing effort to teach myself how to make out of words a total form for whatever content I seize upon. This I understood only too clearly when I was obliged to read through my five existing collections of stories and saw how there are some stories I have gone on writing, again and again, all my life, not so much because the themes are obsessional but because I found other ways to take hold of them; because I hoped to make the revelation of new perceptions through the different techniques these demanded. I felt for the touch that would release the spring that shuts off appearance from reality. If I were to make a choice of my stories in five years' time, I might choose a different selection, in the light of what I might have learnt about these things by then. My 'retrospect' would be based upon which stories approached most nearly what I happened to have most recently taught myself. That is inevitable.

Why write short stories?

The question implies the larger one: what makes one write? Both have brought answers from experts who study writers as a psychological and social phenomenon. It is easier and more comforting to be explained than to try and explain oneself. Both have also brought answers of a kind from many writers; devious answers; as mine may be. (If one found out exactly how one walks the tightrope, would one fall immediately?) Some have lived—or died—to contradict their own theories; Ernest Hemingway said we write out our sicknesses in books, and shot himself. Of course I find I agree with those writers whose theories coincide at least in part with mine. What is experienced as solitude (and too quickly dubbed alienation) is pretty generally agreed to be a common condition conducive to becoming a writer. Octavio Paz speaks of the 'double solitude', as an intellectual and a woman, of the famous early Spanish-American writer, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Growing up in a gold-mining town in South Africa as a member of a white minority, to begin with, my particular solitude as an intellectual-by-inclination was so complete I did not even know I was one: the concept 'intellectual', gathered from reading, belonged as categorically to the Northern Hemisphere as a snowy Christmas. Certainly there must have been other people who were intellectuals, but they no doubt accepted their isolation too philosophically to give a signal they scarcely hoped would be answered, let alone attract an acolyte. As for the specific solitude of the woman-as-intellectual, I must say, truthfully that my femininity has never constituted any special kind of solitude, for me. Indeed, in that small town, walled up among the mine dumps, born exiled from the European world of ideas, ignorant that such a world existed among Africans, my only genuine and innocent connection with the social life of the town (in the sense that I was not pretending to be what I was not, forever hiding the activities of mind and imagination which must be suspect, must be concealed) was through my femaleness. As an adolescent, at least I felt and followed sexual attraction in common with others; that was a form of communion I could share. Rapunzel's hair is the right metaphor for this femininity: by means of it, I was able to let myself out and live in the body, with others, as well as— alone—in the mind. To be young and in the sun; my experience of this was similar to that of Camus, although I did not enter into it as fully as he did, I did not play football...

In any case, I question the existence of the specific solitude of woman-as-intellectual when that woman is a writer, because when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.

The difference between alienation and solitude should be clear enough. Writers' needs in this respect are less clear, and certainly less well and honestly understood, even by themselves. Some form of solitude (there are writers who are said to find it in a crowded cafe, or less romantically among the cockroaches in a night-time family kitchen, others who must have a cabin in the woods) is the condition of creation. The less serious—shall we say professional?—form of alienation follows inevitably. It is very different from the kind of serious psychic rupture between the writer and his society that has occurred in the Soviet Union and in South Africa, for example, and that I shall not discuss here, since it requires a study in itself.

I believe—I know (there are not many things I should care to dogmatize about, on the subject of writing) that writers need solitude, and seek alienation of a kind every day of their working lives. (And remember, they are not even aware when and when not they are working...) Powers of observation heightened beyond the normal imply extraordinary disinvolvement; or rather the double process, excessive preoccupation and identification with the lives of others, and at the same time a monstrous detachment. For identification brings the superficial loyalties (that is, to the self) of concealment and privacy, while detachment brings the harsher fidelities (to the truth about the self) of revealment and exposure. The tension between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer. That is where we begin. The validity of this dialectic is the synthesis of revelation; our achievement of, or even attempt at this is the moral, the human justification for what we do.

Here I am referring to an accusation that every writer meets, that we 'use' people, or rather other people's lives. Of course we do. As unconscious eternal eavesdroppers and observers, snoopers, nothing that is human is alien to the imagination and the particular intuition to which it is a trance-like state of entry. I have written from the starting-point of other people's 'real' lives; what I have written represents alternatives to the development of a life as it was formed before I encountered it and as it will continue, out of my sight. A writer sees in your life what you do not. That is why people who think they recognize themselves as 'models' for this character or that in a story will protest triumphantly, 'it wasn't that way at all'. They think they know better; but perhaps it is the novelist or short story writer who does? Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.

There is also the assumption, sometimes prurient or deliciously scandalized, that writers write only about themselves. I know that I have used my own life much the same way as I have that of others: events (emotions are events, too, of the spirit) mark exits and entrances in a warren where many burrows lead off into the same darkness but this one might debouch far distant from that. What emerges most often is an alternative fate, the predisposition to which exists in what 'actually' happened.

How can the eavesdropper, observer, snooper ever be the prototype? The stories in this book were written between the ages of twenty and fifty. Where am I, in them? I search for myself. At most, reading them over for the first time in many years, I see my own shadow dancing on a wall behind and over certain stories. I can make a guess at remembering what significatory event it was that casts it there. The story's 'truth' or lack of it is not attached to or dependent upon that lost event.

But part of these stories 'truth' does depend upon faithfulness to another series of lost events— the shifts in social attitudes as evidenced in the characters and situations. I had wanted to arrange the selection in sequence from the earliest story collection to the latest simply because when reading story collections I myself enjoy following the development of a writer. Then I found that this order had another logic to which my first was complementary. The chronological order turns out to be an historical one. The change in social attitudes unconsciously reflected in the stories represents both that of the people in my society—that is to say, history—and my apprehension of it; in the writing, I am acting upon my society, and in the manner of my apprehension, all the time history is acting upon me....

What I am saying is that I see that many of these stories could not have been written later or earlier than they were. If I could have juggled them around in the contents list of this collection without that being evident, they would have been false in some way important to me as a writer.

What I am also saying, then, is that in a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject—his subject being the consciousness of his own era. How he deals with this is, to me, the fundament of commitment, although 'commitment' is usually understood as the reverse process: a writer's selection of a subject in conformity with the rationalization of his own ideological and/or political beliefs.

My time and place have been twentieth-century Africa. Emerging from it, immersed in it, the first form in which I wrote was the short story. I write fewer and fewer stories, now, and more novels, but I don't think I shall ever stop writing stories. What makes a writer turn from one to the other? How do they differ?

Nobody has ever succeeded in defining a short story in a manner to satisfy all who write or read them, and I shall not, here. I sometimes wonder if one shouldn't simply state flatly: a short story is a piece of fiction short enough to be read at one sitting? No, that will satisfy no one, least myself. But for me certainly there is a clue, there, to the choice of the short story by writers, as a form: whether or not it has a narrative in the external or internal sense, whether it sprawls or neatly bites its own tail, a short story is a concept that the writer can 'hold', fully realized, in his imagination, at one time. A novel is, by comparison, staked out, and must be taken possession of stage by stage; it is impossible to contain, all at once, the proliferation of concepts it ultimately may use. For this reason I cannot understand how people can suppose one makes a conscious choice, after knowing what one wants to write about, between writing a novel or a short story. A short story occurs, in the imaginative sense. To write one is to express from a situation in the exterior or interior world the life-giving drop— sweat, tear, semen, saliva—that will spread an intensity on the page; burn a hole in it.

Source: Nadine Gordimer, an introduction to Selected Stories, 1975. Reprint by the Viking Press, 1976, pp. 9-14.

What must we do so that the short story can receive the kind of consideration it deserves? We can try to rid the genre of the prejudices that have conspired against it. We can come to it as though it were a fresh discovery. We can settle on one term for the medium, like "short fiction" or "short story." References to names like "anecdote," "tale," "narrative," "sketch," though convenient, merely add to the confusion and suggest indecision and a possible inferiority complex. Too many names attached to the short story have made it seem almost nameless. Even the provincial attitude of teachers and anthologists has not helped. Most often students are fed on a strict diet of British and American short-story writers. But the short story is not solely a British and American product; it is an international art form, and Continental as well as Oriental, and other authors should be more fully represented in any educational program. As Maurice Beebe reminds us, "Once translated, Zola, Mann, Proust, Kafka become authors in English and American literature. "Once this philosophy is accepted, the short story will automatically increase in vitality and stature....

A more modern illustration ... is South Africa's Nadine Gordimer in her 2400-word story ' "The Train from Rhodesia" (1949). What one discovers with this example is that even extreme brevity cannot stifle the short story. "The Train from Rhodesia" is a puzzling story, for Miss Gordimer is trying to say far more than she reveals on the surface. One sees that she is in a world of censorship, the possible loss of a passport, and possible imprisonment and therefore sends cryptic notes from underground. Miss Gordimer's art is the poetic art of ellipsis—much has been omitted; the reader must fill in.

What Miss Gordimer has done is to take a brief space of time and lives and make it suggest a large panorama of feelings and attitudes. For in the story we see the separateness of black and white, and white and white, the world of primitivism (suggested by the hunk of sheep's carcass dangling in a current of air) and civilization (suggested by the train and its inhabitants), and hunger (suggested by the piccanins and the animals) versus sloth (suggested by occupants of the train, who throw out chocolates). The train expands these various threads. For one, the train is from Rhodesia and is to be burdened with white and native problems. In the opening of the story we hear: the' 'train came out of the red horizon and bore down toward them...." Before the train stops in the station, it "called out, along the sky; but there was no answer; and the cry hung on: "I'm coming ... I'm coming...." The last paragraph of the story returns to the train and extends its meaning:' "The train had cast the station like a skin. It called out to the sky, I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming; and again, there was no answer."

The specific actions lead us to the generalizations made above. The pitiful natives smile not ''from the heart, but at the customer." Their primitive art, like the carved lion, is ''majestic,'' but they as vendors are bent' 'like performing animals.'' The old vendor who sells his art work to the young husband for one-and-six has his opened palm "held in the attitude of receiving." The crisis of husband and wife at the story's end is not resolved; it merges with the tempo—gnarled, fierce, disconnected—of the humanized train which expands and heightens the various estrangements. In one place, the wife reflects: "How will they [the native goods] look at home? Where will you put them? What will they mean away from the places you found them? Away from the unreality of the last few weeks? The man outside. But he is not part of the unreality; he is for good now. Odd... somewhere there was an idea that he, that living with him, was part of the holiday, the strange places." This private reflection becomes a public estrangement with her husband: "If you wanted the thing [the carved lion] ... why didn't you buy it in the first place? If you wanted it, why didn't you pay for it? Why didn't you take it decently, when he offered if Why did you have to wait for him to run after the train with it, and give him one-and-six? One-and-six!" The wife returns to her private world: "She had thought it was something to do with singleness, with being alone and belonging too much to oneself." The train's choric chant at the end—"I'm coming, I'm coming; and again, there was no answer"—helps to magnify a world of loneliness, separation, and discord.

... [This] story defies the rules: Its action is small; its meanings are large. It is a poetic story— even more important, an impressionistic painting, for Miss Gordimer wants us to see and to feel the world of Africa through this one incident. The incident is not closed; there are the after effects, nothing is finished off, the problem still exists....

The novelist has been called the "long-distance runner," and he is not lonely. The short-story writer has been called a' 'sprinter,'' and he is lonely. Carlos Baker's reading of Hemingway's short stories is penetrating, as he uses Hemingway's own statement to explain the depths of the form. "The dignity of movement of an iceberg," Hemingway once said, "is due to only one-eighth of it being above water." Many of our great modern short-story writers write in shorthand; and one word, a phrase, can raise the short story to a new level of meaning. There is dignity and hidden depth in the short story. It has been in a deep freeze too long. One looks forward to a thawing out period.

Source: Thomas H. Gullason, "The Short Story- An Underrated Art," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall, 1964, pp 13-31.