Doubling effects in Michael K: the text, the language and the writer

Abstract

This paper seeks to correct binary readings of Life & Times of Michael K by using a post-modernist paradigm that takes into account contradictions and paradoxes in the text. By reading through a revisionary postmodern escape-entrapment framework, the encoded presence of resistance and its effectiveness in praxis in the allegorical narrative and language are assessed. It is also shown how the writer, J M Coetzee, in his discursive practices and philosophical standpoint, is caught up in the linguistic web he himself weaves.