I and Thou: Dialogic Life Narrative in J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood

This paper examines the coconstruction of self and memory in J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood in its relationship to Martin Buber’s I and Thou. Arguing that the self achieves fullness of being only through its meeting with another, I and Thou proposes that selfhood is primarily dialogic. For Buber, the engagement with one’s own memories can also be dialogic—though only to a point, for Buber proposes that the self is unitary and cannot fully engage with itself in the same way it engages with another. Buber’s theory, which surfaces through Coetzee’s oeuvre, offers new insights concerning the representation of memory in Boyhood. Coetzee’s “autrebiography”—a present tense, third person narrative of the author as a boy, as another —takes the examination of memory itself as its subject. With the understanding that remembering is an act of interpreting (rather than an act of simple retrieval of stored information) and that the self is not unitary (one’s past self is another), the fictionalized memoir explores the tension between dialogic and monologic forms of memory and life narrative and, ultimately, I argue, presents a critique of the ahistorical quality of Buber’s theory. In Boyhood, the ability to develop a dialogic approach to others, to oneself in the act of remembering (interpreting) one’s past, and to one’s own life narrative is hindered by the hierarchical realities of apartheid South Africa.