The Return Of The Self—A Narrative Analysis Of Waiting For The Barbarians And Disgrace

John Maxwell Coetzee(1940-),a literary critic and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003,is the first white writer of South African to win the highest prize of British literature the Booker twice.J.M.Coetzee's works are famous for special narrative styles and far-reaching themes.Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace among his novels were respectively published while the racial struggle was running rife and after the apartheid policy was officially abolished.In 2002,when Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace were translated into Czech,journalist Alexandra Bockler began to suppose whether the “tyranny” in the first book has been replaced by the“brutal anarchy” in the second book or not.Actually,the contents in the Coetzee's two works have confirmed the supposition.The two works are highly similar in theme and have similarities in narrative techniques.The protagonists in the two works reflect on themselves,others and society through their cognition of life,re-establish morality,re-recognize beliefs,and return the unsettled heart to be peaceful.This thesis adopts the text analysis method to analyze the state of times and mentality,which protagonists went through,have been reflected under the background of tyranny or brutal anarchy,namely “the return of self”,based on the narrative theory from the narrative time,narrative space and narrative mood.This thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter introduces J.M.Coetzee,the research status,research significance,theoretical framework and structure of the thesis.The second chapter analyzes narrative time of the two novels by using Genette's narrative tense theories,which concentrates on the narrative order,narrative duration,and the relation of frequency between story and narrative in novels,in order to discuss the two protagonists' changes.The Magistrate of Waiting for the Barbarians changes from serving the empire with a loyal heart,to reflecting on everything,risking their lives to resist the atrocities brought about by the empire,and finally returning to peace;David Lurie changes from an arrogant and selfish man to aman that can show sympathy to the weak by understanding others and can apologize to others.The third chapter uses narrative space theory to explore the story spaces in the two texts and the spatial meaning of these story spaces,and the two protagonists' psychological space of the two texts.Firstly,the main story spaces in Waiting for the Barbarians are the Third Bureau which is the most important division of the Civil Guard of the capital,and a remote frontier;city Cape Town and countryside are the main story spaces in Disgrace.Combined with the social environment of the objective world outside the story at the time,the story spaces in the texts are used to analyze the characters in the text.Secondly,everyone has their own psychological space which is not only a projection of a person's inner world to external world,but an internal world constructed by a person's emotions and consciousness after reconstructing the external world.The fourth chapter uses the character discourse and focalization theory in Genette's narrative style.Through the discussion of the way of expressing the characters discourse related to the narrative distance in the two texts,the internal focalization mode is used to analyze the changes of the two protagonists' inner worlds and conducts.The fifth chapter is the conclusion of this paper.The protagonists in the two works reflect on themselves,others and society through their cognition of life,re-establish morality,re-recognize beliefs,and return the unsettled heart to be peaceful.