Foregrounding Boundaries Between Self and Other in South Africa: A Comparative Analysis of The Lostness of Alice, The Good Doctor and Lost Ground

Abstract

Summary The article considers the descendants of the original white settlers’ experience of space and place in terms of the perception of self and other as represented by the male protagonists who feature in three comparatively under-read novels of the post- apartheid period: John Conyngham’s The Lostness of Alice (1998), Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor (2003) and Michiel Heyns’s Lost Ground (2011). After the election of a black-majority government, many white South African men feel that they can no longer negotiate a place that supplies them with a stable and secure sense of self. The novels’ three subjects, who exemplify the psychological condition of these men, endeavour to discover who they are and where they belong. Through the traversal of boundaries, the protagonists make connections with the outside world and the different other. The authors, likewise, stretch boundaries by implementing the narrative frame of the detective novel. To foreground the characters’ search for selfhood, belonging and meaning, reference is made in the article to aspects of identity formation in relation to the other, such as place, and the expansion of place by the navigation of boundaries.