Nadine Gordimer's "Burger's Daughter": Plot Structure

 

The novel Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer can be broadly divided into three parts. These three sections are correlated to the Keatsian pattern of a flight into the word of fancy or romance and the ultimate return to reality. The first part is the reality from where the protagonist Rosa takes a flight into the realm of romance (which is the middle part), and then part three is back to reality again. Reality here is the South African reality of apartheid and its resultant revolt, a struggle in which both whites and blacks play equal roles. Both are equal victims of this policy and have their respective grievances.

Rosa Burger, the protagonist of the novel, moves away from the associations of her leftist parents to associate with Brandt Vermeulen, a white Boer aristocrat distantly related to Rosa's mother. Vermeulen is a bourgeois white who had respect for Lionel Burger as a person but none for his political beliefs. It is Vermeulen who makes it possible for Rosa to obtain a passport so that she may get away, even though for a short while, from the realities of her country to a cosy foreign land. Later, from this colourful world of fancy Rosa returns back to the strife and struggle of her homeland with a mature dedication to the anti-apartheid cause.



Rosa's disillusionment with her father's belief, her venture into a romantic world, an attempt to evade reality and her eventual return to reality- these gradual movements constitute the cycle of the novel. Part I begins with Lionel Burger's trial, his death, and Rosa's dispossession of her home and her heritage, which also dispossesses her of her inherited political affiliations.

When Rosa gives up the house and moves away, she gradually also attempts to move away from all its associations. This part reflects over Lionel Burger's life in flash backs, as Rosa falls back upon recollections. The narrative moves with Rosa living a nomadic existence moving from one accommodation to another, from one job to another, haunted by her past, somehow maintaining survival under the shadows of her father's personality. She tries to distance herself from his circle and therefore contemplates a chance to move away from this country to anchor on the idea of abroad.

All this while she maintains a tangential relationship with her inherited circle, moving on the margin of Lionel Burger's circle-connecting with them very occasionally, very briefly. For she has been denied her passport, and her total dissociation with this world of political activists can make her obtain it. Rosa, finally obtains her passport to distance herself from this pain, neglect and struggle for survival which was her past, and was also her present. She goes to her father's first wife in France.



The last part of the novel depicts the return of Rosa, after a brief spell of romance in France amongst frilly dresses, dating ladies and an affair with a married professor, Bernard Chabalier. Rosa returns to her country, keeping up the faith of Brandt Vermeulen and living up to being 'Burger's Daughter'. She returns to political activism, and the novel ends with Rosa serving a life term, exchanging secret messages with Marisa Kgosana in the prison, with a firm faith in the vision of an independent Africa- same that her father had died for.

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