Nadine Gordimer The Degeneration of the Great South African Lie

Abstract The Excellence Of Burger’s Daughter is due to a judicious combination of the relative simplicity of its plot, the elegance and appropriateness of its style, and the integrity, acuteness, and courage of Rosa Burger’s attempt to define her “self.” The novel is primarily concerned with Rosa’s examination of the priority of her own values, desires, and needs against a nexus of values furnished by the apartheid society in South Africa, by the bourgeois culture in Europe, and by the discipline, compassion, and political ideas inherited from her Communist Father. Given the simplicity of the plot, the major movement of the novel-Rosa’s exploration of her cultural inheritance—is a subjective journey that is perfectly rendered through the bifurcation of the narrative, as in The Conservationist, into objective and subjective components.