Irony, Perspective, and Coetzee's Jesus: Postconventional Morality Passed Into Images

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Fifteen
  In Roundtable Session: Orienting a Life: Time and Perspective (Table 14)

Abstract

The philosophical novels in J.M. Coetzee’s 'Jesus' trilogy are simultaneously mystifying and edifying; their readers are transported alongside the books’ characters through a transformational, if enigmatic, moral journey. One fruitful way of analyzing that journey is by examining a key aspect of the novels’ formal structure, namely, Coetzee’s use of irony. To support that examination, I establish a connection between narratization in personal consciousness and narratization in writing and posit that narratization, therefore, is the means by which we can think of irony as both a literary device and as a lived experience. Thus, irony in these novels serves an existential purpose: it repeatedly elicits in the reader first-hand experiences evocative of what various structural-developmental psychological theories call postconventional morality.

Author

• Rory Varrato, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author