The Moment Before the Gun Went Off

The tragic premise of the story, in which a white farmer accidentally kills his Black son, illuminates the evils of apartheid-era South Africa. Throughout most of the story, it appears to readers that Van der Vyver, a white Afrikaner farmer, has killed a Black farmhand named Lucas during a game drive. Only in the last line of the story does Gordimer reveal that Lucas “was not the farmer’s boy; he was his son” (Paragraph 16). This ironic ending recontextualizes all the information that came before, compounding The Dehumanizing Nature of Racism already made evident in the main character’s perception of the world.

Gordimer uses the literary device of perspective to situate the reader in the uncomfortable psychology of a representative pro-apartheid figure, introducing from the start The Importance of Perception. The role of perspective is critical throughout the short story, forcing the reader to reckon with how racism can warp every aspect of a racist man’s reality.

On one level, Gordimer illustrates the importance of perception to maintaining existing systems of power: the way in which others perceive those in power affects their capacity to sustain that power. As the story opens, Van der Vyver’s priority is how the media will perceive the incident. His community echoes his concerns. The primary issue at hand is not that a man has died. The primary issue is how that death will be portrayed, both at home and abroad. This accident contributes to “helping the Party's, the government's, the country's enemies” (Paragraph 3). Alida, Van der Vyver’s wife, represents this aspect of sustaining systems of power. Her main concern is maintaining the façade that all is well: she resents the “high barbed security fence […] which […] spoils completely the effect of her artificial stream with its tree-ferns beneath the Jacarandas” (Paragraph 11). At Lucas’s funeral, she dresses as she would to attend a white funeral. Her role, as Van der Vyver’s “always supportive” wife (Paragraph 13), is to keep up appearances. Similarly, the act of manipulating the press and normalizing inherently harmful systems supports their continued existence. The ideal for Van der Vyver is invisibility—to go unseen, to avoid the gaze of others. The “boycott and divestment campaigns” (Paragraph 2), in contrast, aim to make injustice visible.

On another level, Gordimer uses perception to demonstrate how racism can corrupt an entire world view: the way in which a racist individual perceives the world is key to justifying injustice. The story opens with Van der Vyver’s emphasis on the fact that the incident was “an accident,” and not even a remarkable one: “[t]here are accidents with guns every day of the week” (Paragraph 2). Van der Vyver insists on the accidental nature of the incident several times. What stems from that perception is self-pity. It is Van der Vyver, not so much Lucas, who is the real victim, given how this incident has exposed the farmer and harmed his reputation. Van der Vyver’s perception of this incident, for which he takes no responsibility, is a parallel for his broader belief that any ills that Black people suffer are their own doing—a natural outcome of their poor decision making. The current status of Black people in society is an accident of nature. Nothing needs to change, not really. It is the Black anti-apartheid “agitators and the whites who encourage them” who are being unreasonable (Paragraph 10). It seems “nothing the government can do will appease” them, “[n]othing satisfies them, in the cities” (Paragraph 10).

Van der Vyver’s insistence on the dominance of his perception, paired with his fear of being seen, suggests how brittle his perception of the world really is. His word is law, in his mind: “there's nothing in doubt—an accident, and all the facts fully admitted by Van der Vyver” (Paragraph 5). Any suggestion otherwise is taken as an inconvenience at best, perhaps even as a slight; as he laments, despite being “a man of such standing in the district […] Van der Vyver had to go through the ritual of swearing that it was the truth” (Paragraph 10). His truth, his perception of reality, must go unquestioned. However, throughout the story, Van der Vyver shies away from being seen: as a child, he ran from attention, and even now, as an adult, he hides his expressions with his mustache and fidgeting. His anxiety about the gaze of Lucas’s dead mother, in particular, suggests that he senses how little criticism it would take to dismantle his worldview.

Gordimer’s exploration of the importance of perception, with the linchpin of the story’s title, culminates in the sense of Impending Change to Power Structures. In the moment of the shooting, Van der Vyver fails to grasp the severity of the situation for Lucas. Thinking Lucas has simply fallen out of shock, “almost laughing with relief, ready to tease” (Paragraph 14), Van der Vyver climbs out of the truck. Lucas, however, does “not laugh with him at his own fright” (Paragraph 11). The two exist in fundamentally different realities, “the black man outside and the white man inside the cab” (Paragraph 13); as a result, Van der Vyver must confront his flawed perception in graphic fashion. “The Moment Before the Gun Went Off,” in a literal sense, refers to the “moment of high excitement shared through the roof of the cab” (Paragraph 14). In a figurative sense, the story captures a sliver of time just before the anti-apartheid movement reaches a tipping point. In this case, though, the unwitting victim will be Van der Vyver’s way of life as he knows it.

The story’s final lines clarify the nature of Van der Vyver’s guilt. Gordimer leverages repetition as a literary technique to drive home this message here, repeating phrases like “how will they know” and “guilty” to make a final play with perspective. In other words, the final paragraph could be read as Van der Vyver’s thoughts or as an exclamation by the omniscient narrator. In the first case, Van der Vyver’s self-pity is on full display. In the second case, the irony shines through. Van der Vyver is indeed guilty, but in a far more profound way than the “crudely-drawn figures on anti-apartheid banners” or “units in statistics of white brutality” (Paragraph 2) can capture. The media is depicting only the tip of the iceberg in terms of how insidiously abusive apartheid has been. Van der Vyver was correct in assuming that outsiders are unlikely to perceive the situation in South Africa accurately—but not because it is being cast in an unfairly ugly light. Rather, it is because the only ones who can fully understand the cruelty of apartheid are those who have experienced it firsthand.