Jump and Other Stories

Jump and Other Stories includes 16 short stories, 11 of which center on unnamed characters. “Some Are Born to Sweet Delight,” “Comrades,” “The Moment Before the Gun Went Off,” “Home,” and “Safe Houses” are the only stories to have named main characters. By not naming so many characters, the collection asks the reader to identify with strangers. Gordimer portrays a world in which men, women, and children of all races suffer. They are strangers to the reader—we often never learn their names—but we can begin to understand their hopes and fears. With this artistic choice, Gordimer shows that we don’t need to know everything about someone to sympathize with them and consider life through their perspective. Unnamed characters also gives the collection a wider focal point. Rather than weigh down the text with 16 stories each with new names, Gordimer allows the drama to take center stage. The collection therefore becomes a portrait of South Africa as a whole.

As she asks the reader to sympathize with unnamed strangers, Gordimer also chooses to omit other details from her narratives. She never states what year any of the stories take place, giving the stories a timeless quality and encouraging the reader to learn more about African history and to see the similarities in their own cultures. These omissions also enhance Gordimer’s commentary on erasure. Over time, names disappear, countries disappear, and cultures disappear. Historic details are fragile, but we can still imagine what it was like to live in different times under different systems of power. In choosing to omit character names and specific setting details, Gordimer shows that readers don’t need to know everything about a person or place to care about them.

Gordimer uses animals to show how humans have fallen out of balance with the natural world. In “The Ultimate Safari,” the girl’s family and other villagers traverse a safari park to reach safety. They can’t light fires out of fear of being seen. They act like the animals to survive, and even follow elephants to watering sources, but they’ll always be separate from nature: “We were never thirsty without finding water, but the animals ate, ate all the time. Whenever you saw them they were eating, grass, trees, roots. And there was nothing for us” (38). Additionally, when the group eats an unknown fruit, they get sick, further emphasizing they are out of place in the wild. Later in the collection, the man in “Spoils” observes an orderliness to nature that is lacking in his own life. Watching the beetles take away parts of the zebra corpse, he notes, “They are flattening it perfectly evenly, who can say how or why they bother with form? That’s life. If every beetle has its place, how is refusal possible” (177). The conflicts that unfold across Jump and Other Stories show a human world out of balance. Gordimer employs animals within these conflicts to create a contrast to the instable human worlds she writes of. When characters witness nature, they see order and balance, markedly unlike their countries being torn apart by racism and violence.

Opposing political factions fight constantly throughout the collection. Within this context, Gordimer’s usage of animals highlights the absurdity of fighting for dominance. In the final pages of the story, the woman in “Amnesty” looks at the wildlife around her and recognizes the limitations of revolution: “The cattle don’t know that anyone says he owns it, the sheep—they are grey stones, and then they become a thick grey snake moving—don’t know” (256). Someday, her family might win their revolution and come to own the farm they work on, but it won’t matter to the farm and the animals that live there. Regardless of who lays claim to the land, the animals there will live the same way. Gordimer’s placement of animals in “Amnesty” sparks this moment of reflection, another example of how the animal world causes characters to pause and consider their actions.