ABSTRACT
The study of the body in its own right can prove to be a chimera, as most philosophical and theoretical paradigms have stressed the body’s belonging to spatio-temporal boundaries and its being part and parcel of man’s subjectivity. J. M. Coetzee’s own fixation on the problematic nature of the other’s body and voice seems plausible because of the repetition of the same process, the representation-frustration play, and may lead us towards a better understanding of the issue of authorial identity. Similarities between Coetzee’s own style and his white narrators’ arise as striking and highlight this notion of narrative identity constructed within each of the studied narratives and throughout them all as a continuum for that identity. Freud suggests that our management of external stimuli that pass through our mental apparatus depends on the pleasure principle which classifies them as either coinciding with pleasure or not.
