Adapting To Post-apartheid Era

Nadine Gordimer(1923-2014)is the novelist who has played a leading part in writing about South Africa ever since the publication of her first short stories. This thesis is devoted to analyzing people‘s efforts to adapt to post-apartheid South Africa as reflected in her three novels, namely, None to Accompany Me, The Pickup and Get a Life.This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One briefly introduces Nadine Gordimer and her works. It also gives a short review of existing studies both at home and abroad and provides an introduction to Homi K. Bhabha‘s postcolonial theory. Chapter two analyzes how Gordimer‘s None to Accompany Me portrays the blacks who have returned from exile and devoted themselves to political issues in order to adapt to post-apartheid South Africa. It also analyzes Vera‘s commitment to political work. She is devoted to land allocation for blacks since the abolition of apartheid in the new era. Chapter three offers a reading of The Pickup, which exposes Julie‘s adapting to post-apartheid South Africa by analyzing her unhomeliness in her home country and her efforts to obtain a hybrid identity in the unnamed Arab country. Chapter four investigates how Paul Bannerman survives alienation and promotes further equality in order to adapt to post-apartheid era. He finally realizes the future of post-apartheid South Africa relies on co-existence between different races and co-existence between human and nature. Chapter five is the conclusion, which points out that in her post-apartheid novels Nadine Gordimer has fixed her attention on adapting to post-apartheid South Africa. As illustrated in her works, post-apartheid South Africa is expected to be a multiracial, multicultural and environmentally friendly country in order to meet the need of globalization.