Racial Complexity: A Dilemma in J.M. Coetzee'‘’s Disgrace

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the issue of racial complexity and the dilemma afflicting a white writer writing in post-apartheid South Africa. Years of colonial and apartheid history in South Africa have exerted an immense strain on the writers and are the acid test of white liberal sensibility in South Africa. Realism has been preferentially selected by the writers to reunite fiction and history. The dilemma before the white writer is whether he can represent the reality through the use of metafictional techniques, metonymy and colonial violence.