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

full awareness of the contradictions involved. His love for his mother is a “fierce and angry emotion…It is because he is so sure of her care that he is on his guard with her, never relaxing, never allowing her a chance.” But he understands his cruelty: “Feeling her hurt…he knows he is in a trap and cannot get out. Love: this is what love really is, this cage in which he rushes back and forth, back and forth, like a poor bewildered baboon” (B 122). He does take sides when absolutely necessary. He chooses the unpopular Russians over the Americans in the Cold War: “He chose the Russians in 1947 when everyone else was choosing the Americans,” realizing only later that “liking Russians was not part of a game, it was not allowed.” So he learns: from a childish, contrary urge at the age of seven to support the less popular side, he discovers that “whatever he wants, whatever he likes, has sooner or later to be turned into a secret”(B 27–28). It is significant, though, that this does not make him change his mind about what he likes, even though the original choice might have been made without much thought. He merely becomes like a trapdoor spider, “always…scuttling back into its hole, closing the trapdoor behind it, shutting out the world, hiding” (B 28). He doesn't want to change: “In that case he would no longer be himself. If he were no longer himself, what point would there be in living?” (B 35).

His identity is constantly in question. “He thinks of himself as English. Though his surname is Afrikaans, though his father is more Afrikaans than English, though he himself speaks Afrikaans without any English accent, he could not pass for a moment as an Afrikaner” (B 124). But, faced with “proper English boys, with English names,” despite “the English language which he commands with ease” and “England and everything that England stands for, to which he believes he is loyal,” he realizes that “more than that is required, clearly, before one will be accepted as truly English: tests to face, some of which he knows he will not pass” (B 129). His constant fear is that he will be relegated to Afrikaans classes at school because of his surname and will be forced to share the classroom with the Afrikaners he shrinks away from, with their “surliness…intransigence, and, not far behind it…threat of physical