| This study places the work of J. M. Coetzee in the European tradition of the novel of consciousness. Analyzing five novels, written in the 1970s and 1980s, it argues that the singular conscious life is the principle of identity formation. Its premise is that narrative form, particularly voice, supports the inquiry into the cognitive processes of the solitary protagonists. With a chapter given to each novel in chronological order, the work charts a qualitative change in how acts of intellection contribute to self-discovery. While the goal of self-knowledge is imperfectly met by the protagonists, they make incremental progress toward a version of truth about themselves and their society. Life & Times of Michael K is considered the pivotal work in the development of Coetzee's oeuvre because it speaks on behalf of the vitality of individual conscious life as the basis of one's human connections.; Power structures drawn from the South African context are analyzed primarily in terms of their rhetorical systems, such as the imperative voice, interrogations, and bureaucratic language. A pattern is identified in In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Life & Times of Michael K, which critique language as a means not only of physical oppression but also of intellectual oppression whereby characters in the hands of masters, mistresses, soldiers, and functionaries cannot think, much less respond. The novels suggest an ethic of language in a social order based on equality that would set aside such rhetoric. Tangential to this ethic of language is an aesthetic of character that accounts for the limited reported speech of the Other whose first language is not English. By this aesthetic, realized fully in Foe, the writer who pretends to know the Other's thoughts in his/her language, then transcribes them in English, compromises that character's consciousness.; The study of narrative form as the means to integrate language and thought focuses on voice and culminates in the final chapter on Age of Iron. Locating the source of narrative tension to be that of two voices--one committed to the epistolary genre, the other to epic distance--the chapter identifies a narrative zone of directed writing whereby the protagonist's self-inquiry moves forward. |
