Modern Sophocles

Well, Nadine Gordimer's "Once upon a Time" has a rather grisly ending, doesn't it? Unfortunately, you can almost see the ending coming. The narrator sets up her theme in the initial story by reflecting that it was the stress and paranoia that actually kept her awake at night, not any real threat. She was stuck in "an epicenter of stress" that entrapped her within a constant state of fear and paranoia of danger. The frame story which then follows this reflection is therefore told with an ubiquitous sense of dread and doom. As the man and woman continue to build up their defenses and safety measures in order to keep danger out and, more importantly, their paranoia away, you start to get a feeling that something disastrous will result anyway, either in spite of these precautions or maybe even because of these precautions. The audience can do nothing but read on as the couple continues to add on more and more security measures, while the boy innocently is "fascinated by the device[s]" and uses them to "play with his small friends."

When the final paragraph starts, and the audience reads as the boy pretends "to be the Prince who braves the terrible thicket of thorns," the sense of dread escalates. Almost before the reader reads of the boy's fate, he can predict what likely will happen. It is this final paragraph depicting the boy's death (or at least near-death) which connects the frame story to the initial exterior story by revealing the situational irony in the boy's mutilation. Like the narrator in her bed, the man and woman had become so stricken with fear and paranoia that they ended up causing severe pain and suffering to themselves in attempts to avoid that same pain and suffering. Like Oedipus trying to prevent a prophecy from coming true, the man and woman's actions are what cause the thing which they dread the most.