Precarious Lives: Near-Death and Survival in Coetzee's Fiction

Abstract: Featuring numerous moments of close survival, J.M. Coetzee's novels display a double concern with precarity—the economic, social and political uncertainties suffered by disenfranchised and marginalized characters—and with the precariousness of life, i.e. the vulnerability and fragility of the body. The significance of the moments of close survival consists in the tension between the religious sense of the precarious as that which is undeservedly given and can be revoked at any time, and the purely man-made, political nature of precarity. Barely surviving, the privileged survivors of Coetzee's fictions are reminded that they owe not only their life to luck but also their privilege of being shielded from most threats to life.