Coetzee writes most of the events in the book, as interpreted by Laurie. He is human, and often the book looks like a journey into his mind. Laurie’s character is neither textbook evil nor heroic. He pays for a service and enjoys the perk of a good company without complexities of being in a relationship, and he does not have traits to be in meaningful relationships. He looks at his relationship with Soraya as uncomplicated as his desires. He loses himself in the arms of Soraya, a prostitute. In the beginning, the reader meets Laurie on his Thursday noon escapades. This solipsistic existence makes him a ‘flawed’ human being. Lurie is not the hero, but a detached soul whose world wombs around his mind, beyond that is an abstraction. “For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well”. The middle-aged professor’s attitude to life is the first sentence of the book. The protagonist David Lurie is an adjunct professor of communications at Cape Town Technical University. However, ‘ Disgrace ‘ goes further by bringing out the psychological nuances of the victims without deifying them. The beauty of this fictional work lies in crafting the emotions of individuals in the backdrop of their political situation. Coetzee’s work ‘Disgrace’ is an attempt to tell the implication of such violence in the lives of ordinary, white and black citizens of South Africa. The brutal conflicts and violence that haunted the country during the 1990s had its roots in the colonial legacy of apartheid. It led to white privilege and relegated the blacks as ‘second class’ citizens. The suppression and exploitation had created fragmented identities coupled with uneven development. The postcolonial period in South Africa saw the end of apartheid and the beginning of an escalating civil war and violence.
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