O EXILADO NA PRÓPRIA TERRA: O K de COETZEE

Abstract

The novel Life & Times of Michael K (1983) very adequately presents a social and political bias that marks the 2003, South-African contemporary Nobel prize winner in Literature John Maxwell Coetzee. In the aforementioned text, we follow the particularly tragic history of the character which entitles the book and whose life trajectory symbolizes the almost subhuman dimension to which are exposed  all those who are marginalized as K himself in the inhospitable space  of South Africa´s segregational reality in the second half of the XXth century. Coetzee wittingly invests on sensitizing the narrators, who occupy the two parts in the book, as to project the layer of reception to the same layer of K’s experiences. In this way, readers sympathize with the character’s difficulties and, while the latter goes on dehumanizing himself before the growing exclusion of which he is victim, readers are able to humanize themselves in a parallel way.