文档介绍：Abstract
Coetzee once said that if there was ever a story that he writes, it would be a story
of a man fighting with his predicaments.
We are born to be free, and we are destined to be in predicaments. It is like a
prison: it limits our freedom, and tortures our soul. All through Coetzee’s novels, we
see prisons, various kinds of them: prisons of solitude, of moral and of identity,
especially in his novel Disgrace. Standing before the prison, we choose either to
worry, to be mad, to resist, or to give up hope and gradually falls into the abyss of
unconsciousness.
Predicament is a common status of living, and a mere realization of its existence,
can resolves lots of affliction in life. This thesis, with the help of many brilliant minds
in philosophical history, analyses Coetzee’s writing on spiritual predicaments, their
cause, their specific writing under Coetzee’s pen, and how the hero deals with them,
successfully or not, and what we can draw from them.
The first chapter of the thesis lays the foundation for the whole discussion. It first
defines the term Predicament in a theological sense. It mainly refers to a situation that
from time to time could be shared by all individuals. In the situation, we keep
thinking upon an issue, balancing all elements of two sides that is indeed quite
equivalent with one another. The situation of how the two sides weigh upon one
another is influential. It determines our strategy and final solution to the puzzle, in
summary; they could all be described as the battle between the limitations of the
surrounding environment and feelings of the inner self. The former could be
historically caused and the latter innately born with.
The following parts expands the topic of predicaments, pointing to three main
predicaments in Disgrace, namely the prison of inter-personal relationship, or rather,
the prison of solitude, which is caused by human nature