A Dialogic Reading Of Coetzee’s Novel Diary Of A Bad Year

John Maxwell Coetzee (1940-?) is one of the best novelists in South Africa and in the world too. Coetzee was the first person to be awarded the Booker Prize twice:first for Life and Times of Michael K in1983, and again for Disgrace in1999. In2003, he won the world-known literary prize Nobel Prize for literature.Diary of a Bad Year (2007), Coetzee’s thirteenth novel, in the first half of which, is written in the form of essay about J.C.’s argument relating to politics, democracy, the abuse of captives, and disgrace etc., and in the second part of it, it tells a story from the perspective of different two characters, one is a male, an old South African novelist J.C. being asked to write his thoughts entitled "Strong Opinions" and "Second Diary" for a German publishing company, and another one is a female whose name is Anya. Anya is J.C.’s neighbor, a most attractive and charming girl, and later is hired to type down the manuscript of J.C.’s strong and week points for him. In the process of typing, Anya is gradually influenced by J.C.’s ideas.The present study is based on Coetzee’s last novel in criticizing the novel (2007) to make an analysis of double voiced discourse by using Bakhtin’s dialogism theories. The study is actually composed of five parts:the first part is the introduction part which gives a brief account of the author John Coetzee, his life, literature review of the novel; the second part, Chapter One, starts with the theoretical foundation, in which the thesis would briefly establish the theoretical perspectives for analyzing the novel. I will apply Dialogism, first advocated by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, to the analysis of Diary of a Bad Year.Dialogism is the essence of polyphonic theory. Bakhtin points out:the text is no longer the representation of the author’s consciousness, therefore it is in an independent status, so are the characters within. Dialogue in Bakhtin’s philosophy is not confined to the ordinary vocal dialogues between fictional characters, but extends to every possible dialogical relationship in the novel including those between characters, characters and the author, and the given text and other texts, too.(Bakhtin,1984:62) As a result, the fictional text is no longer equal to the monophony of a single voice, or the expression of a single ideology, but the polyphony of multiplied and different voices.Chapter Two is about the political claims and Social commentary in the two essay parts of "Strong Opinions" and "Second Diary". In Chapter Three, an analysis goes to the relationship between J.C as a narrator and J.C. as a character, and the relationship between Anya and J.C as a character. Through dialogic analysis of the relationship between the characters of the novel, we can clearly sense the openness and the inter-influentially of narratives represented by different narrators in the novel, and by using free indirect speeches, and by the author’s intention of structuring the novel as a whole utterance and a great dialogue, in which as dialogue penetrates into every word of the character’s discourse, there must be a collision between different voices.To sum up, Coetzee uses the dialogism and openness of his works to resist the ordinary historical discourses’closed and monologue writing mode, and the interpretation of Diary of a Bad Year enables readers to find the social significance of the novel more clearly.