J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year: Between Essay Writing and Fiction

Abstract

Diary of a Bad Year is a hybrid book combining a series of genuine essays with fictional narratives written in the form of a diary and confessional memoirs. With the combination of these different discursive strands and narrative voices on the same page Coetzee tries to experiment with a new pattern of reading. The unusual form of the novel distorts the reader’s conventional perpective on plot and characters while it sustains the narrator’s reflections about the questions of identity and authority involved in the very act of writing. The questions which the article addresses are whether the introduction of topical essays in Coetzee’s book merely serves to provide a substantial thematic background to the fictional strands of the novel or whether the textual composition of the novel constitutes an experimental essay to probe into such questions as narratorial authority, the ethics of writing and the identity of the writing self.