Booker Prize winner and J.M. Coetzee masterpiece, Disgrace, published in 1999 “seems to be a book about endings: the end of rape, the end of morality, and the end of humanity meaning" (Bandici). The novel takes place in the post-apartheid South Africa, where the internal pressures, the anger, the inequalities and the discrimination still haunt the country as the legacy of the previous political system. The controversy behind this novel and how it shows the complex transformation suffered by a society through the eyes of the central character is frightening. Coetzee’s reality is harsh and dark, but only displays one side of the story, “the book was surely intended as a commentary, from a white point of view, for ‘life in the liberated zone,’
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David Lurie is a white middle-aged professor who teaches romantic literature in the university. His taste for exotic women drives him to start a relationship with one of his students, Melanie Issacs. At first, she invites his advantages, yet, is evident that she does not desire him and her decisions and actions are highly influenced by the unfair advantage and the power position that the professor has. Laurie’s description of their affair is quite auto-explanatory, ' 'Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core ' ' (Coetzee). Melanie accused Laurie to the university board and he is forced to resign from his position in academics. Losing his job, his reputation, Laurie decides to move in with his daughter to the countryside, Eastern Cape.
This first situation that Coetzee present us constitutes an allegory to the end of the apartheid, where “David Lurie is in a role of power which turns to powerlessness after a sad turn of events” (Dailey). Along with the change in the political system, it also changes the role of the races and the gender, giving voice to the colored people and also to the women, something that was unthinkable before. It seems to give the reader the idea that the oppression of the previous system was eradicated, or at least in its way to do
David Lurie is a white middle-aged professor who teaches romantic literature in the university. His taste for exotic women drives him to start a relationship with one of his students, Melanie Issacs. At first, she invites his advantages, yet, is evident that she does not desire him and her decisions and actions are highly influenced by the unfair advantage and the power position that the professor has. Laurie’s description of their affair is quite auto-explanatory, ' 'Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core ' ' (Coetzee). Melanie accused Laurie to the university board and he is forced to resign from his position in academics. Losing his job, his reputation, Laurie decides to move in with his daughter to the countryside, Eastern Cape.
This first situation that Coetzee present us constitutes an allegory to the end of the apartheid, where “David Lurie is in a role of power which turns to powerlessness after a sad turn of events” (Dailey). Along with the change in the political system, it also changes the role of the races and the gender, giving voice to the colored people and also to the women, something that was unthinkable before. It seems to give the reader the idea that the oppression of the previous system was eradicated, or at least in its way to do