Once upon a Time by Nadine Gordimer

Once upon a Time by Nadine Gordimer is the story of a woman who is frightened by a sound in her house, so she decides to tell herself a bedtime story in order to help induce sleep. I found the reactions of the people in this story to be extremely exaggerated and quite annoying. The characters seem to be very paranoid that someone will break into their house, which ends up creating a great deal of irony. The family in the bedtime story is constantly looking for better security systems and finally finds one that, “a gang of workmen came and stretched the razor-bladed coils all around the walls of the house” (Gordimer, 235). Soon after, the son of this loving family decides to take a little adventure into this barb wire placed around the castle-like walls of their suburban home.  As expected, the son gets cut up and questionably may even meet his demise. I found this to be a very ironic event because the family invests so much time and money into protecting their family, and their means of protection end up harming their son. The family becomes so obsessed with the thought of being attacked by a riot that they cause the very inside of their fortress to pose as larger threat. I could not have imagined that after harping on how dangerous their society was, the parents end up being the reason for their sons injuries. This irony may show that people who take things to the extreme end up causing the unwanted damage.