J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year: Ethical and Novelistic Awareness

Abstract

In Diary of a Bad Year, Coetzee revisits many subjects that had been recurrent in his previous work. Once more, Coetzee is concerned with textual issues and the ethical responsibilities of the writer. From his independent position, he questions and explores the nature of the novel and the craft of the novelist. This article is concerned with how Coetzee in Diary of a Bad Year establishes a correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Within the frame of the macrocosm, Coetzee, from a critical position, tries to give a response to what is wrong with today’s world. Within the microcosm, the author explores the core and drama of humanness, through the questions, feelings and needs of a seventy-two-year-old writer who is especially aware of his decline and growing limitations. This article studies how three running texts, visually separated on the page, in the last part of the narrative, converge and achieve novelistic unity in the denouement. It proposes that with his literary experimentation Coetzee broadens the scope of the Novel.