Critical Analysis Of Relatives And Alex La Guma's Blankets

When one looks at Chris van Wyk’s Relatives and Alex la Guma’s Blankets, one could argue that the encounters that take place challenge the audience’s expectations and assumptions, particularly when considering the South African context that these stories are rooted in. This means that the audience’s “initial assumption about the nature of an encounter [will] be revised” (Medalie, 1997). Through a critical analysis of the forms and representations of the encounters in these stories, one aims to prove the complex nature of encounters in the South African context.
The nature of the encounters that the narrator has in the story Relatives reflects how encounters are dynamic. Relatives looks at an encounter that the narrator had with two boys on

The initial reaction to the boys is not very promising. The author describes the boys as looking like “…fugitives…” (van Wyk, 1995) and even turns away from them in order to avoid them. The author creates an ominous feeling about these two boys by introducing them directly after a humorous anecdote and sharply contrasting them to the group of lively gentlemen that the narrator feels comfortable speaking with. Eventually, he is left alone with the boys who openly discuss their gang affiliations and the murder they are planning to commit. This initial encounter leads the audience to believe that the boys present some type of danger to the narrator, especially because they are from a reformatory. However, the narrator’s final encounter with the boys is in a newspaper when he learns that the boys, who were actually

The initial response to Choker is one of sympathy. He is lying on a dirty floor in what can be described as an impoverished situation with knife wounds to his body (la Guma, 1964). This initial image of him makes him seem like yet another victim of the socio-political problems in the country that manifest themselves as violence. This sympathy grows when a prison guard refuses to let him choose his own blanket in prison and even more so when it emerges that Choker grew up in a severely impoverished area and as a very young boy, his family could barely affording a blanket that could cover both him and his brother who he shared a bed with (la Guma, 1964). The audience’s opinion of Choker changes, however, after a sexual encounter with a woman leaves the audience wondering if he raped her because she keeps repeating the words “[n]o, man.” (la Guma, 1964) The use of flashbacks allow the audience to encounter different versions of the same character at different intervals in his life, however by the end of the story the audience has mixed feelings about Choker. While initially, it was easy to feel sympathy for him, the uncertainty of his sexual encounter with the woman forces the audience to consider at Choker’s flaws by the end of the story and the story’s open-ending encourages this mixed emotion. (la Guma,