Abstract
In J. M. Coetzee’s first published work, “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,” a novella in Dusklands (1974), the protagonist, a colonial explorer in eighteenth-century Africa (and an ancestor of the writer), prides himself on his slaughter of animals. “I move through the wilderness with my gun … I leave behind me a mountain of skin, bones, inedible gristle and excrement” (79). Such slaughter, he argues, enables his “salvation”: “The death of the hare is the logic of salvation … The death of the hare is my metaphysical meat” (79 emphasis added). Animal sacrifice is thus construed as indispensable to the establishment and survival of the masculine, imperial self.
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© 2016 Josephine Donovan
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Donovan, J. (2016). “Becoming Men” and Animal Sacrifice: Contemporary Literary Examples. In: Herman, D. (eds) Creatural Fictions. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-51811-8_5
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