Allegories of white masculinity in Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor

Abstract

This essay argues that Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor (2003) contests the version of national allegory on which its interpreters have relied. It suggests that, in juxtaposing Frank Eloff’s pragmatism and Laurence Waters’ idealism, the novel opposes two ways of making meaning: the one a complex, polysemic mediation of the private and the public, and the other an idealistic version of history that identifies watersheds it subsequently takes to be constitutive of individuals’ consciousness. Following a brief description of allegory in post‐colonial critique, the article proposes that, if the novel is allegorical, it is so in a far more complex sense than schematic impositions of South African history allow. Rather, the novel engages allegory, as a practice of meaning, by foregrounding the process of identification in which individuals encounter, traverse and rework the history of their context.