Life in the Age of Barbarism - An Anti-Hero of Coetzee at the Apex of Conflict

Abstract

In an attempt to approximate the dialectic method to the critical theory, this article aims at analysing the structures and the aesthetic premisses of the novel Life and Times of Michael K, by John Maxwell Coetzee, in its interfaces with the social, historical and political issues derived from modernity and its peculiar forms of institutionalised violence and dissemination of barbarity. The narrative of the book and, in particular, the construction of the main character, Michael K, legitimate social and literary heir of his near homonym, Joseph K, in Kafka’s The Trial, was conceived of as a constellation that translates the permanent crisis of modernity and the failure of the promise of progress proposed by the instrumental reason which, in practice, has converted itself in a bedrock of ruin and destruction.