A Hero in Disgrace : The patterns of a hero in David Lurie's twist of fate

Abstract: In this essay I look at J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace from a rather different perspective. I argue that, despite his less than heroic attributes, David Lurie is the protagonist of an adventure and follows Joseph Campbell’s pattern of the hero’s ditto. Furthermore, the goal of David Lurie’s journey lies in self-realization and self-reinvention, which is not typical for the hero’s journey. The Ultimate Boon is usually something else but different times call for different heroes. In J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, Derek Attridge suggests that David Lurie grows on the reader throughout the novel and is a better person at the end (Attridge 183). This indicates that David Lurie goes through a process personally that changes him in a positive direction. Besides Campbell’s theory, the theories of Propp and Stanford are presented and put to good use as theoretical background. Since this essay deals with both narratology and structuralism I provide short explanations of these two branches of literature criticism as presented in Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory. I then discuss relevant passages from Disgrace in connection with the different stages of the hero’s journey as described by Campbell. I do so in the order they are presented in Campbell’s book.