Comment upon the author's use of point of view in "Once Upon a Time."

Firstly, it is important to realize that this story is
actually a frame story, or a story within a story. Thus the point of view begins with
Nadine Gordimer herself writing about an incident when she is asked to write a story
about the "duty" of being a writer. In bed that night, she is awakened by a strange
noise. To calm herself down, she makes up a story, which marks a shift in point of view
as we move from first person point of view to an omniscient narrator. We would do well
to consider why Gordimer presents the story with this particular frame around it. When
we consider the fairy-tale element of the central story, and the way it represents a
parody in many ways of this genre, the frame story seems to highlight the message of
what the author is trying to communicate. Although the central story is written as a
tale, the opening grounds the story in reality as we are forced to remember that nothing
in the fairy tale is that long ago or far away, even from the troubled sleep of the
author herself in South Africa. Fear and the lengths that it will force us to go to are
the subject of this tale - with the accompanying tragic consequences of such an
approach. This is the impact of the shift in point of view of this excellent
story.