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

remembers—or creates—a story about frogs in her Australian childhood which she can believe:

The relief seems more than merely temporary satisfaction at being able to make a sincere statement to the demanding judges so she can pass through her gate. But there are many layers of irony here, and they can be peeled back as far as the reader wishes. Perhaps the resistance that is so much a part of Coetzee's repertoire is ultimately skepticism: if you don't accept the usual beliefs of your society, whether they concern sexual morality, censorship, or the rights of animals, you are bound to resist the rules and sanctions which arise from those beliefs. For David and Lucy Lurie, this means a difficult life of hardship and risk; for Elizabeth Costello, after the trials of old age, it means endless days “in a kind of literary theme park.” At the end of the novel, she is still waiting to be allowed through to something which she is not convinced is worth the wait: “There is light, certainly, but it is not the light that Dante saw in Paradise, it is not even in the same league” (EC 209).

And in Slow Man, what are we to make of Paul Rayment's graceless refusal to be helped? When Michael K says, “I have escaped the camps; perhaps, if I lie low, I will escape the charity too” (MK 18), it could conceivably be a reaction to political circumstances, but when Rayment refuses a prosthesis to replace his amputated leg, it seems to arise from nothing but a temperamental reaction to bad luck. He knows he is behaving badly: “A golden opportunity was presented to him to set an example of how one accepts with good cheer one of the bitterer blows of fate, and he has spurned it” (SM 15). It is partly a matter of style: he is old-fashioned, like David Lurie, and rejects the very idea of a prosthesis: “He shudders at the thought of it; he wants nothing to do with it. Crutches