Once Upon a Time by Nadine Gordimer: Summary, Themes and Questions
Quick answer: Once Upon a Time by Nadine Gordimer: full summary with the razor-wire ending, the frame story, the wise old witch and the walled suburb, apartheid themes, plus exam questions.
A writer who has refused to produce a children's story lies awake in the night, hears her house creak on the hollowed mine ground beneath Johannesburg, and tells herself a bedtime story about a family who wall themselves in so thoroughly that their own child cannot get out. Nadine Gordimer published Once Upon a Time in 1989 and collected it in Jump and Other Stories (1991). At about 2,500 words it is a regular in Grade 11 and 12 classrooms.
The story in brief, ending included
The story has two parts. In the first, Gordimer herself speaks: someone has asked her to write a story for a children's anthology, and she has said no, since she does not believe anyone should be told what to write. That night a sound wakes her. She lies listening, afraid of an intruder, and realises the noise is the house itself shifting on the old gold-mine tunnels far below. Unable to sleep, she decides to tell herself a bedtime story.
The story within is a fairy tale set in a white suburb. A man and his wife love each other and their little boy very much, and have a cat, a dog, a trusted housemaid and an itinerant gardener. The husband's mother, whom the tale calls the wise old witch, warns them to take precautions. Riots occur in the townships beyond the city; burglaries rise; the couple install alarms, then electronic gates, then a higher wall. Finally they choose the most forbidding security available, coils of razor wire sold under the name Dragon's Teeth, and run it along the top of the wall. One day the boy, who has been reading Sleeping Beauty, pretends to be the Prince who must climb through the thorns to wake the princess. He climbs into the coil. The story ends with the gardener, the housemaid and the parents carrying his bleeding body into the house.
Who is who
A fairy-tale family without names.
Themes and meaning
Exam readings: fear as a force that destroys what it protects, the self-imprisonment of white South Africa in the last years of apartheid, and the fairy tale turned against itself. The mine tunnels under the house, dug by Black labour, are the literal foundation on which white comfort rests, and they are hollow.
The sharper observation is that the story never shows a single intruder. Every danger is reported or imagined, and the only blood is the child's.
The craft: a fairy tale with the ending it deserves
The turn is the razor coil, the last of an escalating series in which each protection is described with the same affectionate fairy-tale cadence. The technique to steal is genre used as a weapon: the phrases of bedtime stories make the ending land harder than realism could. Structure marks in Writory's Short Story Contest go to writers who let a frame and an inner tale answer each other the way the creaking house answers the coil.
For class and essays
Questions with two-line answers, then terms and one misreading.
What writers can take from this
- Structure an essay around escalation: alarm, gate, wall, coil. Each step is a paragraph.
- Use the mine tunnels: they are the story's most quotable image of a society built over the labour it fears.
- Explain the Sleeping Beauty allusion precisely; the boy is imitating a story of rescue, not misbehaving.
- For writers, borrow a genre's phrases and let your plot betray them.
- Try a frame in which the teller's real situation explains why the inner story must end as it does.
Try it yourself
Write a bedtime story told by a narrator who cannot sleep for a reason they reveal in the first page. Let the inner tale use the phrases of children's fiction while the family in it takes one protective measure after another, and let the last measure be the one that causes harm.
Questions
What happens at the end of Once Upon a Time?
The little boy, playing at being the Prince from Sleeping Beauty, climbs into the razor-wire coil on top of the garden wall. He is fatally cut, and the parents, housemaid and gardener carry his body into the house.
What is the theme of Once Upon a Time by Nadine Gordimer?
That fear destroys what it protects: a family's escalating defences against imagined intruders end by killing their own child, an image of white South Africa's self-imprisonment under apartheid.
Why is Once Upon a Time called a fairy tale?
The inner story uses fairy-tale phrases, a wise old witch and a happily-ever-after formula, but turns them against themselves. The Sleeping Beauty allusion at the end makes the boy's death the fault of the stories he was told.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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