Silence: Coetzee Narrative Strategies

J. M. Coetzee (John Maxwell Coetzee) who was the Nobel Prize winner of 2003 was born in Cape Town, South Africa. As a descendant of the Dutchmen who colonized South Africa at that time, J. M. Coetzee has a complex and unique cultural identity. Being an intellectual who has clear conscience, Coetzee paid great attention to vulnerable groups and tried to express his sincere concerns and compassions to them through his works. Coetzee had developed a set of unique narrative strategies to confront the disordered criminal social reality and word censorship ubiquitous existed in South Africa.In his works, the protagonists withstood all adversities and oppressions with the "silence" in different reasons and different ways. However, this silence is not the same with the silence in the post-colonial context in the past, it was not the symbol of passivity and weakness but a weapon to oppose the reality. It was the slience that means more than any words and it reflected the protagonists'desires for freedom, equality and their pursuits of happy lives. This article will analyze the reasons why Coetzee's had developed his unique narrative strategies and their particular uses in Coetzee's works through the"silent"images in these works to have a detailed understanding of the unique fascination and values of those images.The Introduction: A review of the studies that regard Coetzee. Coetzee's life, works, his status in history of literary and a systemic systliterature review of studies that regard Coetzee both at home and abroad will be concluded in this part.Chapter I: Narrative predicaments caused by cashes between black culture and white culture. Predicaments Coetzee met in writing his works and produced his uses of narrative strategies will be discussed in this chapter. Chapter one is divided into two sections: Section One will be mainly about practical difficulties which also can be called the the external factors like historical background and social reality of South Africa. Section two will mainly analyzes the internal predicaments of Coetzee, namely, the internal reason that caused his uses of narrative strategies like Coetzee's identities, experiences and contradictories in his mind.Chapter II: Silence: Coetzee's Narrative Strategy .This chapter is a succession of the anterior chapter. How did Coetzee break through all the predicaments he met and use one unique narrative strategy to successfully defeat all predicaments from both exterior and internal world will be mainly discussed in this chapter. Chapter Two is divided into two sections. Section one mainly tells how Coetzee got enlightened by the "death consciousness" in modern western literatureworks and began to search for his own narrative strategy. Section two is a detailed discussion about Coetzee's unique narrative strategy----"silence"made by analyseing specific"silent"images in his works.Chapter III: Subversion and Resistance: the narrative function of silence strategy. The three sections of this chapter will mainly discuss roles "silence" played as a narrative strategy in Coetzee's works. Section one tells that "silence" in his works was neither a symbol of negative forces nor a expression of recreance or compromise by comparing it with"silences"occured in post-colonial theory. Section two points out that since different"silent"images had revealed the same messages through their own ways of being"slient", then being"slient"would be a way of living, a weapon of subverting authority and resisting oppression, which reflects a kind of spirit of undefeated. This conclusion is drawn through specific analysis on those images in Coetzee's works. Section three is a explanation about the unique functions of Coetzee's "silence" as a narrative strategy.Conclusion: The unique fascinations and values of Coetzee's"slience"narrative strategy. As a writer with wisdom, Coetzee challenged the authorities by using his own narrative strategy. He used "silence" to breaking his writing predicaments and let his protagonists fing their own lives after experiencing various difficulties. Through his flexible manipulations of this narrative strategy, Coetzee profoundly but delicately exposited the complex situations in South Africa at that time and expressed a strong introspective tendency in his works.