Six Feet of the Country

The protagonist’s wealth is on display from the story’s outset. A partner at a luxury-travel agency, he not only owns a farm but employs multiple farm hands to run it for him. He also evidently values material pleasure, as he delights in the splendor of his country property while also relishing his convenient proximity to the city’s comforts. Yet the protagonist’s material affluence is among the story’s core ironies; his outward prosperity contrasts starkly with the state of his soul, which, for much of the narrative, is impoverished by its egocentric lovelessness.

Making no effort to understand why his employees would spend their precious little savings on a deceased person, the protagonist sees the burial expenses as “wasteful” and wishes for his employees’ sake that they would save the money. His attitude has as much to do with class as with race: As Petrus hands the money to him, the irritably baffled protagonist thinks to himself, “Just like the poor everywhere […] So incomprehensible to people like Lerice and me, who regard life as something to be spent extravagantly and, if we think about death at all, regard it as the final bankruptcy” (15). Though this remark implies his disbelief in eternal life, it’s more telling that he parses human existence in strictly materialistic, self-indulgent terms. Moreover, his flippancy toward grief suggests he’s never truly had to worry about his or his loved ones’ mortality. He has allowed his life of wealth, and the relatively unfettered well-being it affords, to calcify his imagination; he has seldom needed to venture beyond the boundaries of his own ego, beyond his immediate and personal reality of privileged comfort.

While the protagonist’s insularity resounds in his belief that the funeral expense is wasteful, his hubris also plays out indirectly. For instance, he irreverently considers resuming his game of golf soon after the funeral procession passes by—a funeral he completely forgot would be held that day, despite its importance to his employees. Golf is famously associated with wealth and the upper classes, and in Gordimer’s story, the leisure sport further symbolizes a spiritual penury: The protagonist fails to register the gravity of the funeral procession because he fails to register others’ experiences, especially as those experiences involve suffering. Therefore, though he “spend[s] extravagantly” on himself, he is a miser in the deepest sense, refusing to expend the essential currency of the heart: compassion.

The protagonist does transform as he develops a moral outrage at the mortuary’s impassivity and incompetence, and the least egocentric passages of his narration appear near the end of the story when he ponders the unfathomable whereabouts of the lost body, as well as its dehumanizing anonymity. Even so, the story’s last sentence suggests his character arc’s limitation: “The old man from Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) was about Lerice’s father’s size, so she gave him one of her father’s old suits, and he went back home rather better off, for the winter, than he had come” (20). The statement’s irony lies in its materialism, as the deceased’s father is not truly “better off.” Though he returns to Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) with a new suit, he has lost both his son and the opportunity to mourn his son with a proper burial.