Life & Times of Michael K Study Guide

J. M. Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940. His father, Zacharias, was an attorney and worked for the government, including time in the military, while his mother, Vera, was a schoolteacher. Coetzee went on to study for both a bachelor’s and master’s degree at the University of Cape Town. His master’s thesis focused on the novels of Ford Madox Ford. He received a PhD from the University of Texas, Austin, where he wrote his dissertation on the works of Samuel Beckett. Coetzee then worked as a university professor in the U.S. before returning to South Africa, where he worked as a professor at the University of Cape Town from 1972 to 2000. In 2002, Coetzee moved to Australia, and he became an Australian citizen in 2006. Coetzee published his first novel, Dusklands, in 1974. He is perhaps most well-known for his novels Disgrace (1999), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), and Life & Times of Michael K (1983). Both Life & Times of Michael K and Disgrace won the Booker Prize—one of the United Kingdom and Ireland’s most prestigious literary awards—which made Coetzee the first writer to win that award twice. Coetzee then went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

Life & Times of Michael K depicts a fictitious civil war, but the the novel is set in South Africa during the historical apartheid era. Apartheid was a period of racial segregation that lasted from 1948 to the early 1990s. The word apartheid comes from an Afrikaans word that means the state of being “apart.” During apartheid, the White minority in South Africa implemented racist and segregationist policies that oppressed the country’s non-White majority. Those policies grouped people into four classifications based on race and enforced a rigid hierarchy based on those classifications. The hierarchy gave White people the highest status in the country, followed by people referred to as “Indian,” people referred to as “Coloured,” and people referred to as “Black.” In the novel, Michael K is at one point described on a form using the letters “CM—NFA,” suggesting that in the classifications of apartheid, K is a “coloured man” with no fixed address. From 1960 to 1983 (Life & Times of Michael K was published in 1983), apartheid policies led to the forced removal of 3.5 million Black people from their homes. The government then forcibly relocated those people into segregated areas, which they were not allowed to leave without a special permit. Resistance to the oppressive policies and human rights abuses of the ruling party led to both nonviolent and violent resistance as well as a prolonged period of political violence. Approximately 21,000 people died as a result of that political violence. In 1990, prominent political leaders of parties opposed to apartheid were released from prison, including Nelson Mandela. The government in South Africa then rescinded apartheid policies in 1991. In 1994, South Africa implemented elections where all citizens, regardless of race, were permitted to vote, which resulted in the election of Nelson Mandela as the country’s president.

Many of Coetzee’s novels, including Life & Times of Michael K, address themes of apartheid in South Africa and the impacts of colonialism and colonization on the culture. Some of Coetzee’s most well-known novels cover this theme, including Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace. K wrote his master’s thesis about the English writer Ford Madox Ford, whose novels include The Good Soldier and Parade’s End, among others. For his PhD, Coetzee studied the novels of the modernist writer Samuel Beckett, who won the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature. Beckett’s most prominent works are perhaps the plays Waiting for Godot and Endgame. He also wrote a trilogy of novels titled Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. Life & Times of Michael K is also indebted to the works of Franz Kafka, particularly Kafka’s novel The Trial. That novel tells the story of Josef K, who is arrested and put on trial by a mysterious authority. Kafka never discloses the nature of Josef K’s crime, and Josef K also seems to be unaware of what exactly he is accused of. Critics have cited the lack of context Coetzee provides in Life & Times of Michael K about both Michael K and his fraught circumstances as evidence of Kafka’s influence on Coetzee. Similarly, the name of the novel’s protagonist, Michael K, also seems to be a direct homage to Kafka and his works.