Figueroa 1
Raul Figueroa
Professor Martin
English V01B
2 May 2018
Evolvement through Disgrace
John Maxwell Coetzee’s Disgrace, is a novel that was not very well received by the
people of South Africa, although it won him a second Booker Prize. This was because the novel
portrayed a very dark and negative view of the post-apartheid period between the races. This can
be connected to what Dorothy Allison once said “Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other
categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside”.
By keeping this in mind, the storyline of Disgrace, depicts a white male David Lurie, the main
character in the story who thanks to his inability to accept that the world has come a long way
and changed through the course of time. In the novel Disgrace, Coetzee, uses some of the focal
characters to express the literary element of theme, which is described through sex and violence
by portraying men as being supreme over woman by making them seem weak and unworthy.
Sex. Without sex and reproduction there would be no humans in this world and society
would be nonexistent, but how does one differentiate sex versus love? With sex being a very big
topic in the novel, the reader is first introduced to David Lurie, a fifty-two-year-old man. This
fifty-two-year-old man happens to be twice divorced and surprisingly has a weekly appointment
at a local brothel where he attends to satisfy his needs. The reader learns this in the first few
sentences of the novel and one can infer that David Lurie is not going to be in anyway your
typical church member. Instead, one can depict David as a player in modern terminology. This
idea or image is supported when Coetzee mentions “On Thursday afternoons he drives to Green
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Point. Punctually at two p.m. he presses the buzzer at the entrance to Windsor Mansions, speaks
his name, and enters. Waiting for him at the door of No. 113 is Soraya” (Coetzee 1). From very
early on, the reader learns that David is much in to sex and he does not hold women very high.
The reader learns this because he has resorted to attending a brothel for his needs instead of
finding a real meaningful relationship elsewhere. At the end of the day, the only thing he thinks
woman are good for is to be a servant to his needs. This argument is well backed up by Eric
Meljac through his analysis of David, “Throughout the novel David drowns in egotistic self–
satisfaction” (Meljac150). A phrase that comes to mind when one analyzes David is “You cannot
have your cake and eat it too”. The reason this comes to mind is because David comes off as an
arrogant old man that puts himself first, instead of being considerate of others. This quote is
backed when David mentions “It surprises him that ninety minutes a week of a woman’s
company are enough to make him happy, who used to think he needed a wife, a home, a
marriage. His needs turn out to be quite light, all after, light and fleeting like those of a butterfly”
(Coetzee 5). When the reader analyzes these simple lines from David, the reader can see the
type of mindset Lurie is in, it is as if he is on a natural high where nothing matters to him. He has
begun to question why he ever got married in the first place, if simply visiting a brothel for
ninety minutes would give him all the joy in the word. One can conclude that he may have not
been a husband who liked hearing how his wife’s day was or cared how she was doing, he was in
it purely for the sex.
While Soraya only appearing in a few chapters, she becomes a character that helps shape
the book. She serves as a key character that helps the reader understand David and how he views
women. David introduced Soraya as:
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Tall and slim, with long black hair and dark, liquid eyes. Technically he is old
enough to be her father, but then, technically, one can be a father at twelve…Her
temperament is in fact rather quiet, quiet and docile. In her general opinion she is
surprisingly moralistic. She is offended by tourists who bare their breasts
(‘udders’, she calls them) on public beaches; she thinks vagabonds should be
rounded up and put to work sweeping the streets. How she reconciles her opinions
with her line of business he does not ask. (Coetzee 1)
Even though she is young enough to be David’s daughter, she still holds high morals even
though they do seem a bit contradictive compared to her line of work. Being that she has those
types of morals one can conclude that maybe she is only in that line of work due to her current
financial situation, or is possibly being forced to do it. As the saying goes, all good things must
