J.M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative
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J.M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative By Gillian Dooley

Chapter 2:  Coetzee's Freedom
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His writing does not lack love or fail to celebrate life, but does so with a clear-eyed skepticism that is far more bracing and valuable than the optimism of many more deliberately celebratory works. Despite their desperation, there is a vitality in survivors like Michael K and the Magistrate, and Diary of a Bad Year goes a long way towards a more generous spirit of harmony and reconciliation, with an unexpected mutual trustfulness and regard growing up between J. C. as he approaches death and the young and vital Anya.

Nevertheless, resistance, in the sense of rejecting, or at least questioning, the claims of society that are unthinkingly followed by most people, is ingrained in Coetzee's fiction. In the earlier books, it was assumed by most critics that this was a reaction to the political situation in South Africa:

Almost from the beginning, his novels struck one as ways of escape from the most immediate contexts, the South African, in which they were produced.… The more oppressive conditions of life in South Africa were to become—and these conditions have hardly relented, even at the time of writing [1996]—the more transcendent, one might say, became the formal impulses of his novels, the more profound the misery and revolt of their protagonists. No matter what, it would seem that Coetzee could not help building into his novels certain spaces (or, perhaps, places of refuge) which might or might not exist, but which were designed to elude the dead-weight of South African life in the 1970s and 1980s. (Huggan and Watson 3)

Most clearly seen in From the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, Age of Iron, and Life & Times of Michael K, this spirit of rejection, the impulse to slip the chains of what is expected even though the consequences are an even greater bondage, might be viewed, however obliquely, as a political stance. But what of David Lurie's resistance in Disgrace? His refusal to defend himself or to even try to soften the consequences of his sexual misdeeds can hardly be regarded as a noble political crusade, although there is a certain obstinate nobility in the penance he submits himself to. From the beginning, he realizes that