Self-(de)constructions in J.M. Coetzee’s Dusklands

Abstract

The Nobel Prize-winner South African author, J. M. Coetzee in his debut novel, Dusklands (1974), allows the reader to take a look into the astonishing worlds of vulnerability and violence through the juxtaposition of two locally and temporally discrepant narratives, whose fictional world is dominated by authority. This paper attempts to explore the collapse of the individual identity of the narrators, along the prevailing literary discourses around the time of the novel’s publication, with special regard to the changing concept of the self in post-modern works and to the manners of rewriting its Cartesian concept.