David Kippen is an educator and specialist on British colonial literature and twentieth-century South African fiction. In the following essay, he discusses the symbolism of location and geography in "The Train from Rhodesia" and how it underscores the silence and symmetry of the narrative.

In one of the more insightful recent discussions of Nadine Gordimer's "The Train from Rhodesia," South African critic Robert Green writes in The Novels of Nadine Gordimer that the story "map[s] out the silence and asymmetry between black and white." There is much to recommend using these ideas of "silence" and "asymmetry" as points of departure into Gordimer's story. The building blocks Gordimer selects for her setting—the station, the train, and her principal characters—provide context essential to the story's action. If the silence between the domains of black and white is most evident in the unfolding of Gordimer's plot, it...