Significance of the Dog in J.M. Coetzee's disgrace - Essay Example

This is Coetzee’s first book that deals explicitly with South Africa’s post apartheid scenario, that paints a cheerless picture and comforts no one, no matter to which race or nationality they belong. Coetzee’s primary theme in ‘Disgrace’ revolves around a man who is broken down and reduced to almost nothing, but finally searches and finds a small speck of redemption by way of his acceptance of the realities of life and death. The protagonist in the story is Professor David Lurie and Coetzee’s notion of life with its harsh realities and brutal tyranny being replaced by brutal anarchy are reflected through his protagonist David in South Africa, a place filled with social and political conflicts.

Coetzee’s scintillating novel makes use of a metaphorical device such as the use of different animals and in particular dogs to bring out the developments of his characters. Dogs play a stylistic role in this novel as it is portrayed as being a means of protection for the Whites. During his childhood, Coetzee’s mother created a great impact on him where dogs were concerned. It is her influence which was a major contributing factor for Coetzee to use dogs as the defining factor in his novel ‘Disgrace’.

His mother often reflected on her past life which included the “walks with the dogs”. . David is a divorced, middle-aged scholar of Romantic poetry, who during the Mandela Era, became a victim of "the great rationalization". His university was replaced by a Technical University at Cape Town where he teaches lessons in “Communicative skills” that he finds rather useless and nonsensical. The dignity he has there, is short lived as he is caught having a relationship with one of his poetry students and is dismissed from the university.

Coetzee describes him as “a mad old man sitting among the dogs singing to himself”; a man who invests his last savings into a pickup truck to pursue his work as a dog-undertaker. David further sinks in disgrace when he patronizes a prostitute and buys her gifts, but in the course of this relationship he becomes such a nonentity that she refuses to see him. He imagines her and her friends shuddering when they see him just as "as one shudders at a cockroach in a washbasin in the middle of the night".

David contemplates asking his doctor to castrate him in the way one neuters a domestic animal. In Coetzee’s story this is the first reference made between human and animal existence. One of Coetzee’s striking techniques is to explore what it is to be human, which is deftly brought out through his characters by placing them in extreme and compelling situations. The protagonist David has to experience and endure physical torment and psychological abasement. He falls deep into disgrace and flees Cape Town to his daughter Lucy’s remote farm.

Lucy hears his story and very matter- of- factly tells him, "This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals." This is another one of the comparisons made in this story between humans and