Subaltern Under Power Oppression

John Maxwell Coetzee is one of the best white writers in contemporary South Africa and his works have had a remarkably strong appeal for readers and drawn increasingly provocative attention from academic readers. As a writer with great conscience, J.M. Coetzee pays great attention to the social situation of South Africa and the existence state of the people of South Africa. He shows great care on human nature, history and responsibility, civilization and wildness, body and violence in his works. There have been many critical essays about his stories, his style, his language and his themes. In the light of some related concepts of Foucault's theory of power and postcolonial theory, this dissertation is tentatively making an effort to interpret the minor characters who are taking the role of Subaltern in J.M.Coetzee's novels to approach this great writer's creative mind and inner world.This thesis deals with three of his novels from five aspects. Firstly, there is an introduction to Coetzee's life and his works, and then it offers a general overview of the criticism on Coetzee's works both from China and abroad. In Part Two, some related information about the theory of postcolonialism and Michel Foucault's theory of power are employed. Then next, I will briefly introduce the social background of South Africa and people's living conditions there from the beginning of the system of apartheid to its demolition. The focus of Part Three is to reveal the enforcement of power through human body, knowledge and discourse by applying Michel Foucault's theory of power to the analysis of the minor characters in Coetzee's three important novels. Those minor people in Coetzee's novels, not only the non-whites but also the whites, become the Subaltern when they are controlled by the torture of the body and the regulation of knowledge, whether in the form of the law or the history created and recorded by the Empire. Part Four deals with the different reactions of those minor characters while confronting the role of becoming the Subaltern which includes the resistance of the people of non-whites and the re-identification and redemption of the whites. In the last part, the dissertation elucidates the conclusion that Coetzee, as a writer of the third world has witnessed the suffering of people in South Africa under the apartheid and post-apartheid regime. He pays his special attention to all of the minor people without the classification of race, color and gender, to all of those who are living under the power, tortured by the power and confined by the power. It also shows Coetzee's humanitarian concern for all the injustice, suffering and oppression exerted upon the people. What's more, Coetzee also shows his great hope that one day there will be a real reconciliation of all human beings without any classification in his works.