A Postmodernist Reading of J. M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus

The Second World War ended with a profound wave of disillusionment in humanity, along with the rejection of numerous accepted beliefs. As a result, skepticism set out to be the most fundamental aspect of postmodernism, along with other characteristics that are considered as inseparable parts of postmodern literary works. The Childhood of Jesus is a praised novel written by J. M. Coetzee in ۲۰۱۳, revolving around the adventure of David and Simon, both in search of a mother for David and later, their journey to navigate their lives in a dystopian society. As postmodern assessments play such pivotal role in literary studies, this research tries to identify whether Coetzee's novel can be analyzed by referring to the characteristics of postmodernism, or not. Using these features and the fundamental postmodern notions, The Childhood of Jesus is analyzed, and later, with the concluding results, it indicates that even though Coetzee was not a proclaimed postmodernist writer, and with a few of the postmodern characteristics not aligning with the novel, yet The Childhood of Jesus can be read by being associated with the majority of those characteristics, and thus, it demonstrates significant potential to be classified as a postmodernist novel.

کلیدواژه ها:

Postmodernism ، J. M. Coetzee ، The Childhood of Jesus ، fiction