Conclusion

We

Amy E. Varela

pp. 176-193

in: Carrol Clarkson, J. M. Coetzee, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

Why? Because he dares to mention his own death to this boy, this forerunner of the generation that will take over his world and trample on it? Perhaps. But more likely it is because of our. Our record, yours and mine. Because just possibly this image before them, this distribution of particles of silver that records the way the sunlight fell, one day in 1855, on the faces of two long-dead Irishwomen, an image in whose making he, the little boy from Lourdes, had no part and in which Drago, son of Dubrovnik, has had no part either, may, like a mystical charm — I was here, I lived, I suffered — have the power to draw them together. (Coetzee, Slow Man 177)