To these groups of people (readers like us), it will be extremely evident that the butt or target of the story is racism, racists, and society's tacit approval of whites' persecution of blacks in South Africa.
In conclusion, one important function of irony (and other devices such as contradictions) in "The Lemon Orchard" is its role in building up the story's stability and reinforcing the message that racism is bad. While this paper argues that "The Lemon Orchard" is stable and suggests that the story is incomplete because La Guma wants readers to imagine the impending violence themselves, and because there is no need for him to describe the beating, it is nevertheless important to realize that the story cannot be entirely stable since there will always be discursive communities that may in principle misinterpret "The Lemon Orchard," thinking that it condones racism. In subsequent papers, scholars can perhaps explore the various ways different discursive communities understand not only "The Lemon Orchard," but also investigate this phenomenon in other apparently stable texts.
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