The Dialectic of Subjectivity in J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace

The primary focus of this paper is to show that Coetzee’s characters suffer from intense psychological and existential unrest that evinces an unending and inexhaustible search and desire for meaning, pattern, and order. These characters show a capacity for reflection and volition that characterizes subjectivity in its various emotional and intellectual modalities. Coetzee grants centrality to a character who assimilates and interprets the external world that sometimes recedes. His character’s conception of subjectivity is determined by the ambivalent tension between a desire for connection and a longing for isolation. This subjectivity is shaped by interaction with a larger, social, and cultural milieu, rendering the character’s life a symbiotic interplay of cultural and individual contexts. This paper highlights this violent exchange that always leads to the friction between the self and the other, resulting in fractured identities that resist fixed political or ethical categorization. It consequently shows that Coetzee’s recondite works, especially Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace, register a real involvement in the deep machinations of the subjective experience; therefore, this paper aims to grapple with this particular complexity of individual ambivalent subjectivity within the post-apartheid South African history and social and political structures.