In a final, bitter compromise, the narrator pays to have the body exhumed from a temporary grave (where Petrus had secretly buried it overnight) and transported to the state-mandated cemetery. The story closes with the narrator and Lerice visiting the "native location." They find a vast, barren, and unmarked field of graves. They cannot find Petrus’s brother’s grave. All they see is an anonymous stretch of earth, identical for every black person. The narrator realizes that his battle was never about this one man, but about the principle of dignity—a principle the state systematically obliterates.

Crucially, Gordimer refuses to make the narrator a hero. His motives are mixed. He wants to help, but he also wants to be rid of the problem. He is angry at Petrus for causing the trouble, at the dead man for dying, and at the government for making his life difficult. He never once learns the brother’s name. The man remains a nameless "boy," an object of procedure. This is Gordimer’s sharpest critique: even the most sympathetic white person in apartheid South Africa cannot fully see the humanity of the black subject. The narrator’s final failure to find the grave is a symbolic failure of empathy. He returns home, his brief moral outrage exhausted, while the system continues unchanged.

The narrator’s journey is one of forced political awakening. Initially, he is a typical liberal white South African: irritated by the demands of his black servants, dismissive of Lerice’s softer sympathies, and convinced that he is a fair man. He does not see himself as a racist. However, as he fights the bureaucracy, he is forced to confront his own powerlessness. He cannot buy, bribe, or argue his way past the law. For the first time, he experiences a fraction of the dehumanization that black South Africans live with daily.

The story is narrated by a white man who, with his wife Lerice, runs a small "holding"—a rural plot of land outside Johannesburg. They have recently moved from the city, seeking a simpler life. Their primary interaction with the black population is through their servants, particularly their houseboy, Petrus.

Six Feet of the Country is not a story about a heroic stand against injustice. It is a story about the limits of liberal goodwill within a totalitarian system. Gordimer shows that apartheid’s horror lies not only in its violence but in its mundane, bureaucratic efficiency. The state does not need to kill the narrator to defeat him; it simply needs to lose his file, refer him to another office, and repeat the rules until he gives up.

What follows is a Kafkaesque nightmare of red tape. The white bureaucrats are polite but immovable. The narrator learns that it is illegal to bury a black person on white-owned land. He is shuttled from one office to another—the pass office, the health department, the non-European affairs department. Each official explains the regulations with clinical detachment: the body must go to the "native cemetery." The narrator argues, pleads, and even offers bribes. He discovers that the "six feet of the country" he owns is not his to give. The land is his property, but its use is governed by the racial geography of apartheid.