J.M. Coetzee’s character Michael K spends a lot of time as a lone ranger character who has sporadic interactions with other individuals throughout the novel Life and Times of Michael K. Much of the story advances forward with paragraphs of details about what Michael K is doing and thinking and Coetzee only provides periodic spurts of dialogue between Michael K and other characters in the story, many of whom only appear for a short episode and then quickly leave the novel. Thus, Coetzee does not use these dialogue moments as a foundation for the development of relationships between Michael K and other characters, but rather to show Michael K’s personal search for his own voice as he journeys through his mortal experience.
Within the novel, Coetzee provides a very clear picture of Michael K’s inner workings, particularly his thoughts about his purpose in life. Early in the novel Coetzee writes that Michael K believes “he had been brought into the world to look after his mother” (7). As Coetzee expounds on the very next page, though, Michael K did not view his responsibility as a need to provide for her or to meet her needs, but rather “he accepted without question” all that she recommended and his job was to put things in motion to meet her recommendations (8). However, when Michael K’s mother dies early on in the story, he is left without his guiding voice, the voice that directed Michael K’s purpose for being, and therefore feels lost and forlorn.
From Michael K’s wanderings, there is a poignant moment in Michael K’s search for his voice, a moment when he is laying his mother’s ashes in the earth, but as he does so, he waits. Coetzee writes,
He laid the packet of ash in the hole and dropped the first spadeful of earth on top of it. Then he had misgivings. He closed his eyes and concentrated, hoping that a voice would speak reassuring him that what he was doing was right – his mother’s voice, if she still had a voice, or a voice belonging to no one in particular, or even his own voice as it sometimes spoke telling him what to do. But no voice came. (58)
So, even as Michael K is trying to find his own voice, he is still waiting for direction from someone, anyone else, on how to proceed; even on such a personal choice of where to bury his mother. But no voice comes. The reason no voice comes is because Michael K is a character caught between what someone else tells him to be and where his place is and what he thinks and wants his place to be. In this middle ground that Coetzee creates there is no voice because the two conflicting voices collide and all that is left is silence. Therefore, Michael K is a silent character, without a voice, because he is stuck in the middle of two ‘velds’: his own personal perception of his ‘veld’ and everyone else’s perception of his place in the ‘veld.’
Works Cited
Coetzee, J.M. Life and Times of Michael K. USA: Penguin Books, 1985. Print.
Nice take on Michael and his perspective on responsibilities- I, too, felt that the conflict for Michael relied not solely on responsibilities but in the amount of work that must be invested into an act, whether it’s getting to know someone or how much he celebrates a particular victory, especially one that most people may find trivial. I had somewhat the same take on him, especially when it came to meeting others. At first, the character seemed pathetic, but after really getting into the character, there is a sense of stripping away his old life of a forced ideology and coming into his new individualized one, even if it comes at the cost of losing some of his humanity. I also first thought of this text as a book of survival, especially due to the war scenes and various engagements with soldiers, but after the beginning section, Coetzee becomes more interested in bringing K to life through removing as much of his passed life from him as much possible.
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