In "Once Upon a Time," what do the changes to the neighborhood, including Gordimer's description of the "prison architecture," suggest about...

The changes to the neighborhood are multitudinous, and grow larger throughout the course of the story. In the beginning, the family is described as follows:

They were inscribed in a medical benefit society, their pet dog was licensed, they were insured against fire, flood damage and theft, and subscribed to the local Neighborhood Watch, which supplied them with a plaque for their gates lettered YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED over the silhouette of a would-be intruder.

These precautions are not particularly overdone: like the fence around the swimming pool, they serve a practical purpose. Most people have insurance, most people license their pets, many people subscribe to a neighborhood watch program—but the plaque adds an element of concern and foreshadowing. Unnecessarily antagonistic, it speaks not to pragmatism but to fear.

As the story continues, the neighborhood’s changes are driven less by reasonable precautions and more by fear. Security is paramount—it is the reason behind the electronically controlled gates and burglar alarms—but it quickly becomes evident that the security measures are ineffective. The alarms in particular are too easily triggered, often by pets or mice, and so:

The alarms called to one another across the gardens in shrills and bleats and wails that everyone soon became accustomed to, so that the din roused the inhabitants of the suburb no more than the croak of frogs and musical grating of cicadas' legs. Under cover of the electronic harpies' discourse intruders sawed the iron bars and broke into homes, taking away hi-fi equipment, television sets, cassette players, cameras and radios, jewelry and clothing, and sometimes were hungry enough to devour everything in the refrigerator or paused audaciously to drink the whiskey in the cabinets or patio bars.

Alarms are so named for a reason: they should shock people into realizing that something is wrong, so for them to be no more alarming than a cicada’s song means they have failed in their purpose. Adding insult to injury, the thieves actually take advantage of the noise to steal more. If the inhabitants of the neighborhood were more practical, they would realize the alarms have done far more harm than good. Instead, they keep the alarms and search for additional security measures. The very devices that they rely upon to keep them safe have quite obviously made them more vulnerable; at this point, it becomes evident that fear has overtaken reason. This pattern continues to escalate until the family’s son is caught in barbed wire and dies.

The story speaks of fear, just as the narrator’s frame does. Gordimer notes that “I have no burglar bars, no gun under the pillow, but I have the same fears as people who do take these precautions,” and proceeds to spin a story about how physical protection is no deterrent to fear. This fear leads to a mindset in which security is the only worthy value: worth more than empathy, as can be seen when the wife stops feeding people on the street; worth more than practicality or reason or pleasure; and, ultimately, worth more than their son’s life.