Deconstruction in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

Being a post-colonial text, J. M. Coetzees Disgrace is a multi-layered narrative of deconstruction- from the language, the eccentrics and their values, the ground and the context. Deconstruction is a strategy employed by J. M. Coetzee to present and evaluate the effects of colonialism within the South African post-apartheid context. After the removal of the apartheid dodging that has hounded South Africa for the longest time, one would expect a complete relapsing in values, beliefs and practice amongst the people and the community-both rural and urban.Coetzee subverts this expectation by limning a post-apartheid life and existence that is still, in the metaphorical sense, imprisoned and clinging to the miserableness and antiquity of the colonial past. David Lurie, the lead character and the narrator in the literary text is a man who has drunk and gobbled many of lifes bitter disappointments- from his unfulfilled teaching days in a university morose technical college to his d emotion as a caretaker of terminally ill animals in his young ladys heighten.Coetzee deconstructs Davids character by portraying him as a man still shackled from his own vices and values as salubrious as from the old world that boxed and created him instead of a free, able man in a post-apartheid environ(ment). On another level, Davids character undergoes deconstruction by being depicted as a egg white South African male in a time and shopping center (post-apartheid) where the whites do hold as much power as they at once used to. In terms of language, Coetzees prose is anti-realist. Truth and meaning in his narrative are not laid bare explicitly it is cover and laced with undertones, symbols and irony.The novel also deconstructs the romantic pastoral prototype of the farm novel tradition through its portrayal of a lonely and bare(a) farm, and through the narrator Magda, a lonely spinster suffocated by an surround of intellectual and spiritual drought (Subverting the pastoral the transcendence of space and ready in J. M. Coetzees Disgrace 2006). Coetzee transforms the farm which often conjures up an image of one that is idyllic and laidback into a setting that is marred with unhappiness and disillusionment.