The Fate Of The Characters In The Works Of Coetzee And The Salvation Of The Soul

The fundamental destiny of J. M Coetzee’s protagonists can be summarized as follows: someone who always become outsiders, then involve surprisingly and repeatedly. Coetzee’s heroes degenerate into the painful boundary situations, due to collision of history and reality, and attacks of daily misfortune, natural aging and illness that they have experienced. They are forced to confront the borderline life of world margins as outsiders, exploring proper ways of involvement to escape being marginalized.When confronting the boundary situations, some of Coetzee’s heroes, by adopting active attitudes, become Sisyphusian rebels; some continually escape out of instinct; and others falter and get lost in dilemmas. The process of reacting, escaping and hesitating describes the agonizing degeneration of their own destiny. His protagonists are overwhelmed by the urge to sink but paradoxically derive strength from being stripped of all external dignity. Extensive reading reveals a recurring pattern, the downward spiraling journeys he considers necessary for the salvation of his characters.The suspension of cultural identity and the suspension of his motherland South-Africa deprive John Coetzee, the protagonist in Coetzee’s autobiographical trilogy, of the root of existence in any place of the world. From Boyhood to Youth, and to Summertime, the destiny of rootless aliens becomes indispensable and permeates everywhere, throwing John Coetzee into an outsider’s situation of thorough alienation. To find remedy for such spiritual agony, however, John Coetzee dedicatedly resorts to writing to achieve his own salvation while undergoing the degeneration of individual destiny.Due to Kafka’s position as a criterion to evaluate other writers and his great impact on Coetzee, similarities and differences coexist in the character’s destiny in both of their works. Kafka’s characters immediately sink to the boundary situations because of "original sin", thus founding the keynote of their fate-----their attempts will turn out to be vain. Coetzee’s characters become marginalized because of concrete incidents, and this limit situation is only the beginning of their stories, in which they agonizingly seek involvement and witness various disguised alienation of our times. Yet, their regain of strength to face up to reality at the worst of their fate finally proves that the holy human nature is sure to illuminate places of darkness.