The Conservationist is widely regarded as constituting a transition in Nadine Gordimer’s work, from her earlier realistic fiction with its detached stance to the kind of prose which has earned her a respected place as an engaged African writer: fully identified with the materials she is dealing with and, through the delineation of her protagonist, Mehring, exposing the inevitable demise of the white capitalist class in South Africa and the reclamation of the land by the blacks. Moreover, her shift to a more experimental technique, and especially the use of stream of consciousness, has been seen as one of the markers of that transition. Through a close analysis of Mehring’s internal monologue, this paper aims to show that embedded in her prose there can still be found a universalist humanist quest for wholeness which is not subsumed in the ideological and political reading and which exists side by side with it, thus making for a more complex, richer reading.