The White Writer in Apartheid and Post-apartheid South Africa: Guilt, Confession, Testimony in J.M. Coetzee, N. Gordimer, B. Breytenbach, and A. Krog

The present dissertation develops a comparative analysis of four texts written by white South African writers during and after apartheid: Breyten Breytenbach’s The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1985), J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990), Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun (1998), and Antjie Krog’s Coutry of my Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (1998). After a first introductory part concerning the historical South African context, with particular reference to the role of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the analysis of the procedure of confession from a philosophical, social, historical, and religious perspective, the texts are analysed by focusing on the themes of confession, truth, sense of guilt, and testimony. Particular emphasis will be placed on these writers’ identitary quest in their search for the definition of the self, as well as on the stress put by them on the private as opposed to the public. The obsessive need to understand an unbearable past and the frustrating failure of the communicative act become traits shared in common by all the four works. Finally, a short section is devoted to the language of confession by highlighting the most relevant linguistic features that characterize the white liberal South African’s confession of the self. Without presuming of being an exhaustive stylistic analysis, this part may be said to open the path for a further work of analysis to be profitably developed.