Cat's Eye

Gordimer employs a paradoxical mingling of continuity and change in order to introduce the Smales' unsettling immersion into a foreign class structure. The fact that July "began that day for them as his kind has always done for their kind" suggests a static continuity or repetition that belies the radical setting change between affluent "governors' residences, commercial hotel rooms, shift bosses' company bungalows" and the "aperture in thick mud walls" that now serves as the Smales' front door. The setting change--an abrupt transition between "the knock on the door" and the non-sequitor that follows ("no door")--not only foregrounds the correspondence between "place" and the formation of identi...