On Diary Of A Bad Year From The Perspective Of The Other

John Maxwell Coetzee, the Booker Prize winner and the Nobel Prize laureate, isone of the most prominent figures in the literary arena of South Africa and the world.His works focus particularly on the marginalized other under oppression withoutdiscourse right, revealing the cruel nature of hegemony through depicting thepredicament that the characters of the other are subjected to. Diary of a Bad Year, thelately published novel, has attracted the attention of many a researcher by its audaciousand mordacious opinions as well as the peculiar triptych narrative form which meldsfiction, autobiography and social commentary altogether. However, no information hasbeen found that any previous research of this book has been conducted from theperspective of the other as this thesis should do. With Jacques Lacan’s definition of theother as the theoretical foundation, this thesis carries out a careful exploration of thenovel’s content and narrative strategy together with the support of theories such asfeminist theory, theory of discourse power, dialogic theory, etc.This thesis, after the definition of the concept of the other, first delves intoCoetzee’s personal experiences, elucidating the reason of the choice of the other as themajor approach to the analysis of the novel. This part contends that as an offspring ofthe Afrikaners born in South Africa, Coetzee cannot identify with the Afrikaners for hisabhorrence of their extreme nationalism, or with the black Aborigines with the inbornsin of colonizer imprinting on him. So he drifts from South Africa to America and thento Australia in search of his cultural identity, which ends up in vain as he is often treatedas an outsider. Coetzee’s multicultural background, combined with his diasporicexperiences, gives rise to his perspective of the other since he is often a marginalizedother in different cultures.The thesis then digs into the plight that the characters of the other undergo in thenovel through critical textual analysis, exploring Coetzee’s sober meditation overcivilization and humanity. The characters of the other in Coetzee’s writings includeindividuals opposed to state hegemony, hybrid other, female other in the patriarchalsociety, aged people at the margin of mainstream society, and animal other in thehomocentric society. Through the disclosure of the predicament of the other, Coetzee places himself out of the power center to reflect on all sorts of hegemony, interrogatingthe rationalism of modern society.On grounds of the innate correlation of dialogic theory and the relationshipbetween the self and the other, the last part, based on Bakhtin’s dialogic theory, probesinto the extraordinary narrative mode of this novel, illustrating the dialogic relationshipbetween the author and the character, among different characters, and different voiceswithin a protagonist’s mind. It is pointed out that the dialogic nature of the novel isclosely related to Coetzee’s perspective of the other. His literary creation, influenced bythis perspective, rejects hegemonic oppression and advocates mutual communicationbetween the self and the other.In Diary of a Bad Year, Coetzee gives a full manifestation of his technicalvirtuosity in literary creation, exploring multiple themes incisively while adopting anovel and distinctive literary form. His perspective of the other caused by his hybrididentity and drift experiences induces him to be devoted to the care of the other whilekeeping otherness, breaking the traditional dichotomy and reconstructing thesubjectivity of the other so as to construct a harmonious and tolerant ideal society whichembraces the difference and advocates the coexistence of the self and the other.