“Once Upon a Time” by Nadine Gordimer is a modern fairy tale. It tells the story of a once happy family living in an affluent suburb of South Africa who move emotionally from contentment to fear as they protect and isolate themselves from the rest of the population who are the disadvantaged and poor “people of another color.” Gradually they add more protection to their home as their fear grows. Ultimately and ironically, the protection …showed first 75 words of 797 total…

…showed last 75 words of 797 total…tales have a royal character. The young son assumes the role of Prince in a fairy tale when he re-enacts a bedtime story that has been read to him and attempts to scale the barbed wire wall, braving a “terrible thicket of thorns,” to rescue Sleeping Beauty. Unlike a traditional fairy tale with a happy ending, the son becomes entrapped in the barbed wire until a “bleeding mass of the little boy was hacked out”.