The Stories We Tell: Individual and Society in The Childhood of Jesus

Abstract

Abstract: Commentators have drawn attention to the close relationship between The Childhood of Jesus and Coetzee's exchanges with Arabella Kurtz in The Good Story . Read in the light of The Good Story's concern with the stories we tell ourselves about the lives we lead, our relationship to those stories and to their truth or falsity, the stories of Simón and David, their tensions and conflicts with one another and with the sometimes-incompatible stories told by the inhabitants of Novilla, exemplify the contemporary postmodern human condition. In particular, Childhood explores the consequences of what Coetzee calls a common postmodern situation in which someone is aware that a story is not true but nevertheless commits to it wholeheartedly. It shows how lives are changed by the commitment to a particular story and how they unfold as a result of the tensions that develop between individual and collective stories.