The Narrative Features In Coetzee’s Disgrace

J.M. Coetzee is one of the most prolific and notable post-colonial literature writers in South Africa. Not only do his works have a profound influence on the development of South African literature, they also enrich the wealth of world literature. Therefore, studies on Coetzee’s works can help to broaden our literary horizon, and to trigger new thinking of contemporary literary creation and literary criticism.Coetzee’s masterpiece Disgrace, winning the Booker Prize in1999and Nobel Prize for Literature in2003, has garnered a great deal of attention home and abroad since its publication. It is the most important post-apartheid South African novel today, not only for its proven capacity to provoke important cultural and political debates in South Africa, but also in terms of its artistic merit and literary influence. Disgrace is arguably the most typical demonstration of Coetzee’s manipulation of a unique narrative style and shows his extraordinary artistic charm.This argumentation interpretates Coetzee’s Disgrace from the perspective of narrative strategies, thus highlighting Coetzee’s narrative features and expanding the new vision of literary criticism in his works. Chapter one is the discussion of the narrative space in Disgrace:the spatiality of the narrative structure is firstly discussed, followed by the focus on the space metaphors and the elusive setting, which contribute to an allegorical reading of Disgrace. Therefore, We can better understand such a vivid allegory based on the solemn social reality in South Africa and the allegorization of his narrative features. The discussion of multi-voices created by the use of third-person internal focalization, covert voice and free indirect discourse and the effect of multivalence is shown in chapter two. Based on the previous discussion of the narrative strategies, Coetzee’s artistic concerns of symbolism and postmodernism are discussed and his unique literature view and artistic ideas will be highlighted in chapter three. He creatively inserts symbolism into the post-apartheid South Africa theme in Disgrace. And the ambiguity and indeterminancy created by the internal focalization and the use of free indirect discourse make the novel endowed with characteristics of postmodernism.