Six Feet of the Country by Nadine Gordimer: Summary, Themes and Questions
Quick answer: Six Feet of the Country by Nadine Gordimer: full summary with the wrong body in the coffin, Petrus, Lerice and the narrator, apartheid themes, and exam questions with answers.
A farm worker's brother dies of pneumonia after walking illegally from Rhodesia, the authorities take the body for a post-mortem, and when the family pays twenty pounds to get it back, the coffin holds a stranger. Nadine Gordimer published Six Feet of the Country in 1956, as the title story of her second collection. It runs to about 5,000 words and has been a set text in South African senior classrooms and in international anthologies for two generations.
The story in brief, ending included
The narrator, a white travel agent, and his wife Lerice have bought a small farm ten miles outside Johannesburg, where she plays at farming and he escapes the city. One night Petrus, one of those workers, comes to say that his young brother, who arrived secretly from Rhodesia looking for work, has died in the huts of pneumonia. The narrator, following the law, reports the death, and the health authorities remove the body for a post-mortem.
Petrus asks for the body back so the family can bury it. The narrator learns that this will cost twenty pounds, an impossible sum, and is surprised when Petrus and the other workers raise it among themselves. The coffin arrives, the old father travels down from Rhodesia, and the funeral begins. As the men carry the coffin the old man notices its weight and insists it be opened. Inside is the body of a heavy, elderly stranger. The narrator spends days telephoning officials who cannot say where the brother's body has gone, and he cannot recover the twenty pounds either. The story ends with the old father returning to Rhodesia without his son and without the money.
Who is who
A white couple and the people whose lives they manage.
Themes and meaning
Exam readings: apartheid's reduction of Black lives to paperwork, the failure of white liberalism, and dignity in death denied. The title's phrase, six feet of ground for burial, is the one thing the family asks and the state cannot deliver.
The sharper observation is that the story is told by its own culprit. The narrator sees everything and changes nothing, and Gordimer makes his intelligence part of the indictment: he can describe his complicity in beautiful sentences and still go back to his travel agency.
The craft: the unreliable liberal
The turn is the opening of the coffin, staged late and with the whole community watching, so that the private wrong becomes a public one. The technique to steal is the narrator who is more honest about others than about himself; Gordimer lets his ironies about Lerice and the workers reveal the coldness he cannot see. A story in which the teller is the problem can carry a political argument without a single speech.
For class and essays
Questions with two-line answers, then terms and one misreading.
What writers can take from this
- Use the title in your first paragraph: the phrase is literal and the story is about the denial of exactly that much ground.
- Quote the coffin scene's weight detail; the old man's body knowledge beats the state's paperwork.
- Contrast Lerice's tears with the narrator's telephone calls as two kinds of response.
- For writers, try a narrator who is witty about everyone else and let the wit leak his own guilt.
- Place the reveal in front of a crowd; public discovery multiplies the force of a private wrong.
Try it yourself
Write a story narrated by someone who helps with a stranger's crisis out of correctness rather than care, and let the help fail in a way that is nobody's fault and everybody's. Keep the narrator's tone ironic and let the reader hear what the irony hides.
Questions
What happens at the end of Six Feet of the Country?
When the coffin is opened at the funeral it contains a stranger's body. The narrator cannot trace the brother's remains or recover the twenty pounds, and the old father goes back to Rhodesia with neither his son nor the money.
What is the theme of Six Feet of the Country?
Apartheid's treatment of Black lives as paperwork, the hollowness of white liberal goodwill, and the denial of dignity even in burial.
Why is the story called Six Feet of the Country?
Six feet of earth is all the family asks for their dead, a grave in the country where the brother died, and it is the one thing the system cannot give them.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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