Disgrace is the story of David Lurie, a professor at Cape Technical University in South

Africa. The first sentence of the novel claims that: "For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced,

he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well." In fact, sex has become a big

problem for him, and is about to get much bigger.

In Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee enters intimately into the mind of a twice-divorced academic,

David Lurie, as he wrestles with the impediments that societal standards place on the

fulfilment of his sexual desire. Fired from his position in Cape Town because of sexual

misconduct with a student, the professor goes to live with his daughter, Lucy. Lurie, a

specialist in Romantic literature, is catapulted into a rural South Africa much different from

the scenes described in Wordsworth. Crime, poverty, and rape fill the landscape of Salem,

and Lurie and his daughter must salvage what they can of their relationship after violence

strikes.

Disgrace is unique stylistically because even though it is written by a third person

narrator, David Lurie's point of view dominates the story. 'Free indirect discourse' and 'third

person limited' are terms that describe this mode of writing. Coetzee decision to use this

technique gives his audience access to not only Lurie's spoken words but also his unspoken

thoughts. The reader becomes intimately familiar with Lurie's desires, passions, and

discourse.In fact, Lurie's discourse is distinctively academic in nature. David Lurie is a

perpetually thinking character, living more in abstract thought than concrete experience.

Disgrace's narrative style grows out of Lurie's studies in literature and language. Throughout

the narrative, Coetzee inserts phrases in Afrikaans, Latin, German, Italian, and French into

the text.

Talking about animals, thinking too much about them, does run the risk of diverting

attention away from the novel's depiction of the difficulties encountered by human beings in

dangerous times. And of course many humans suffer just as greatly as animals in Coetzee's

bleak post apartheid world. Indeed, our "instincts" tell us that human suffering somehow

means more, that it should register more profoundly than that of animals. This should not,

however, blind us to the real sufferings inflicted on and experienced by countless animals as a

result of what Derrida describes as "the industrial, mechanical, chemical, hormonal, and

genetic violence to which man has been submitting animal life for the past two centuries"

(395). Nor should it diminish the possibilities of exploring a relationship between the two

spheres of suffering. Personally, I have no wish to overturn the hierarchy. I certainly do not

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wish to minimize the extent or depth of human suffering which is a legacy of a system of

government that imposed untold hardships on huge numbers of people over a period of nearly

half a century, a system of government that regarded the majority population as not fully

human. But just as human beings continue to suffer in that place, so too do animals. And it is

the altogether unexpected implications of this shared suffering that challenge and then

transform Coetzee's difficult protagonist, David Lurie.

The novel, however, continues for some considerable time by displaying little interest

in animals. For much of the time they are either barely discernible (the shrimp in the salad, a

Malachite heron, the gopher design on a pair of slippers) or objects of revulsion (the

cockroach in the washbasin, the worm in the apple). When they do feature in the earlier parts

of the novel they are usually the stuff of metaphor: "bull's eye," "chickens come home to

roost," "dogged silence," and so forth. When they are invoked more explicitly it is in order to

demonstrate narrowly anthropocentric concerns. For example, contemplating self-castration

in the first of many despairing and self-pitying moments, David Lurie's sympathies are

briefly and, in the light of his later encounters with animals, inadequately extended to them:

"they do it to animals every day, and [they] survive well enough, if one ignores a certain

residue of sadness" (9). This is pretty much typical of the style of discourse David retains for

large parts of the novel. Until the point when animals become a real, physical presence in his

life (and on occasions after it) he is prone to making casual and avowedly disinterested

assertions on the worth of animal life. The first substantial exchange with Lucy is illustrative.

Accompanying her on a visit to meet Bev and Bill Shaw, David is repelled by the smells and

sights of animals in their house: "cat urine ... dog mange ... birds in cages ... cats everywhere

underfoot" (73). The garden is just as bad:

Man's best friend plays a huge role in Disgrace, particularly after David moves to the

country. On a surface level, they become characters in the novel. Some of the dogs that Lucy

cares for in her kennel, like Katy the bulldog, have names and recognizable personalities.

When you think about a little more carefully, though, it becomes apparent that they're not

there as just your average canines; rather, Coetzee deliberately repeats the image of dogs as a

way to emphasize the novel's interests in social status and personal disgrace.

On a broad scale, Coetzee employs dogs as a way to represent the statuses that various people

hold in society. Lucy, for example, once says, "I don't want to come back in another existence

as a dog or a pig and have to live as dogs or pigs live under us" (8.71). Sure, we all love dogs,

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but they live life lower on the totem pole than we do. Think of how dogs are used to

characterize Petrus, as well; when we meet him, he introduces himself to David as the "dog-

man" (7.55). At this point, he occupies the role of assistant to Lucy. As he ascends the social

ladder, however, this changes. At his party, he jokes that he is "not any more the dog-man"

(15.69). In one respect this is a tasteless joke about how all of Lucy's dogs were murdered –

after all, he can't be the dog-man if there are no dogs to care for. At the same time, though,

we can see this statement as an assertion of Petrus's growing social status: he's no longer on

level with the dogs.

The opposite seems to happen to David. Though dogs are used to characterize his

status, they more often reflect his personal, internal trials and tribulations. As things get

worse for him and he dives deeper and deeper into shame and disgrace, his character becomes

more closely aligned with that of a dog. When he talks to Lucy about his own humiliation at

the University following his affair with Melanie, he compares himself to a dog that is beaten

for following its sexual instincts (11.20-22). In a more concrete way, as David's personal

situation worsens, he spends more and more time in the animal clinic helping to put dogs to

sleep. On one hand, this act represents letting dogs out of their misery and suffering, but on

the other hand, it's a truly pathetic way for them to go. Perhaps it's even more pathetic that

David involves himself in the task.

As the novel winds down, the connection between dogs and people experiencing

disgrace is made more explicit. Consider the following exchange between Lucy and David as

they discuss the humiliation of how things have turned out:

"Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with

nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity."

"Like a dog."

"Yes, like a dog." (22.112-114)

To be a dog in this world is to be a base, low, helpless creature without rights or pride.

Not long after this exchange, David becomes attached to one particular dog at the clinic that

suffers from a crippled leg. Even though he sees disgrace in dying, he also sees extreme

shamefulness in the way the dog is forced to live. The novel ends with David putting the dog

out of his misery by giving it up to Bev for lethal injection. When he does so, we get the idea

that he's in some way trying to save the dog from a life that is more disgraceful than death.

We can't help but think that he does so in part to symbolically relieve his own sense of

disgrace. The persistent presence of dogs in Disgrace pushes us to consider the shame and

disgrace that humans go through, even though it plays out through the lives of animals.

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