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

half-sleep in which consciousness does not vanish but continues to hover.… At last it has come, the moment of ecstatic unity with the All!” The ironic tone, though still lingering, abates for a moment: “If he has not utterly been transfigured, then at least he has been blessed with a hint that he belongs on this earth” (Y 117). From here, we might expect some improvement, and indeed, John finds a computer programming job which he finds absorbing after the drab misery of his work at IBM. But disenchantment returns: he cannot get started with the writing which he believes will define his life, and Love is as distant a prospect as ever. The book ends on a passively suicidal note, “locked into an attenuating endgame, playing himself, with each move, further into a corner and into defeat” (Y 169).

In Boyhood and even more in Youth, the narrative is peppered with question marks. The young John's uncertainty about what to feel makes him a continual questioner, and despite the relentless misery, the questions create a comic effect, the irony directed by the writer against his beleaguered younger self. Both books are written in the third person, increasing the ironic detachment the older Coetzee assumes: as Head points out, “Coetzee contrives to depict his youthful self in as poor a light as possible” (Cambridge 15). Even the hopelessness of the ending of Youth is comic, especially since the reader knows of the literary triumphs ahead. Choosing to end there, rather than earlier with one of John's moments of surprised happiness, or later with the beginnings of success, is certainly an artistic decision. A note of hopefulness at the end would not suit the book's overall tone and would, strangely, undermine the humor, which is based upon the young John's self-conscious resistance to anything which might interfere with his poetic vocation or betray his dour self-image as heir to