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

force” (B 124). So his sense of racial identity, in a society where race is an integral part of everyone's self-image, is confused: all he knows is that he doesn't unequivocally belong with any group.

In religion, his family is “certainly nothing” (B 18), which causes bleakly comic difficulties at school, where one must belong to one of the three categories: Christian, Roman Catholic, or Jew. Belonging is something Coetzee only gives himself to wholeheartedly in respect to his uncle's farm. He feels that he belongs on and even to the farm, though it will never belong to him and he knows “he will never be more than a guest, an uneasy guest” (B 79). He is conscious that his father's family, whom he despises for their “life of dull, stupid formulas, of being like everyone else”(B 79), for reasons not entirely clear but the subject of brooding speculation, resents him and his mother and that he is not completely welcome on his beloved farm, the farm which he knows will be lost to him forever one day.

All this adds up to a sensibility with few certainties, a wary, prickly, preternaturally observant boy who has to hold himself constantly in check and who questions the basis of everything. Although he has a romantic vision of himself as “different, special…waiting to be called” (B 108), the cause in which he is to be enlisted is obscure. Perhaps some hint of it is contained in the final pages of the book. His great-aunt Annie dies, leaving behind her a storeroom full of copies of her father's book, which she had spent her life translating, publishing, and trying to sell. John finds the book too boring to read and knows that his great-grandfather, the author, was “a terrible old German, terribly cruel and autocratic” (B 118). Nevertheless, after Aunt Annie's death, he wonders about the books, which everyone else has forgotten. “He alone is left to do the thinking. How will he keep them all in his head, all the books, all the people, all the stories? And if he does not remember them, who will?” (B 166). This is the end of Boyhood, and it sounds like the declaration of a vocation. It sounds like a reluctant acknowledgment of a dedication to a cause which even he finds boring or unpleasant, but to which he has committed himself. In the same vein, in his 1984 essay “Remembering Texas,” he recalls his studies in so-called primitive languages. Finding