"Life Unworthy Of Being Lived":"Bare Live" In J.M.Coetzee's Three Allegorical Novels

As a white writer born into South Africa—a post-colonial community,Coetzee quests constantly for the role that is available for him and the responsibilities that he should shoulder.Thus,political engagements assume great importance in his literary creation.His oeuvre always focalizes on the tragedies of those insignificant,marginal characters under the subjugation of politics,reflecting all sorts of ethical quandaries that human existence is directly confronted with in the modern political context.His Waiting for the Barbarians(1980),Life&Times of Michael K(1983)and The Childhood of Jesus(2013)address respectively the sufferings and traumas imposed upon human life by governmental techniques,state apparatuses and refugee reception policies.In addition to that thematic continuity,there is also a stylistic affinity among them:they are all composed in an experimental "allegorical" narrative modeThis thesis,taking the images,sufferings and rebellions of the minor characters portrayed by Coetzee in these three allegorical novels as a point of departure and Giorgio Agamben's concept—"bare life" as its theoretical underpinning,aims,firstly,to reveal Coetzee's sharp insight and trenchant critique on the latent mechanisms of those decayed political structures;and secondly,to illustrate his literary imagination and writing on the eternal motif—"political redemption and political futurity"—in the South African,Australian and ultimately global discoursesThis thesis falls into five chapters.Chapter One serves as an introduction which offers a sketch of Coetzee's life trajectory and artistic career.It is followed by a literary review and a brief overview of Agamben's concept "bare life".Chapter Two focuses on a group of barbarian war captives—the "sacred men"-who are subjected to the legalized political violence in Waiting for the Barbarians,disclosing that,under the political calculations,there is an intrinsic "coupling relation" between law and violence.Chapter Three analyzes how Michael K,a camp inmate in Life&Times of Michael K,employs the transcendental mode of existence as a "werewolf" to counteract the oppression brought about by the camp system which has been deployed by the apartheid as the paradigm to organize and manipulate human existential spaces.Chapter Four explores in The Childhood of Jesus the image of a group of refugees who are under the repression of the de-subjectifying and homogenous migration policies,illustrating how David rebels against the ossified rules,authority and conformity by means of "play","magic" and "imagination".Chapter Five concludes that Coetzee's abiding engagement with human existential predicaments and unfailing exploration of potential ways to attain political redemption not only manifest his profound concern about the precarious conditions of mankind in the modern political context,but also indicate that he is not,as some critics claim,politically evasive or overly pessimistic.