A Study of Narrative Strategies in Nadine Gordimer’s ‘The Conservationist’

Abstract

Nadine Gordimer, a representative South African novelist and the Nobel laureate of 1991 has successfully depicted the contemporary reality in fiction in artistic terms. The novelist by holding a mirror to South Africa's political, cultural and emotional attitudes represents the language and voice of the people, their culture and tradition by introducing new avenues of experience for the readers. The motifs of the novels cover the whole range of human life and activity. Gordimer was recognized potentially major artist, a talented, serious and careful writer who treated important contemporary issues. Although a realist concerned with detailing the manners, ideas and changes in her society, including its politics and racial injustices, she had an unusual interest in the symbolic, the psychological and also the art of fiction. The mixture of the British fictional tradition, with its liberalism, individualism, social detail, and the European literary tradition of ideas and revolutionary demands in her novels required new forms, new techniques, a new consciousness.