ABSTRACT
The recurrence of the same narrators’ nature and characteristics—white narrators who want to tell the stories of black characters—finds its echo in another pattern that yokes the four selected novels together: that of how the body is framed in these novels. “The body” is used to refer to the bodies of the black and/or oppressed characters in J. M. Coetzee’s novels. The closed nature of their bodies and stories is a resistance against any attempt at (mis)representation, which maims the white narrators’ storytelling and transforms it rather into a kind of exorcism. Elizabeth Curren finds herself confessing that the white citizens of South Africa, witnesses to all the killing and violence taking place around them, do not deserve to live while those children die by bullets “Made in South Africa. In Age of Iron, Coetzee makes his first-person narrator Elizabeth Curren narrate a scene which should be understood as the description of her own death, helped by her companion Vercueil.
