Search for Home: A Comparative Study of Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael Kand Waiting for the Barbarians

Abstract

This paper aims to demonstrate the postcolonial aspects of the search for home in John Maxwell Coetzee's (1940) novels—Life & Times of Michael K and Waiting for the Barbarians. From a postcolonial perspective, home is a fluid and fragile construct that challenges traditional notions of home under the force of displacement, oppression, and identity crisis. This paper discusses Coetzee’s novels Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), focusing on the definition of home both as a physical space and existential ideals. Whereas Michael K wants to secure a physical and psychological space as home in order to escape the unjust apartheid system, Magistrate struggles to get a moral and ideological space as home free from the brutality of Empire. Although their circumstances differ, both characters experience home not merely as a physical or ideological space, but as a shifting and unstable concept shaped by oppression, identity crises, and the longing for freedom. This paper represents how Coetzee deconstructs the traditional definition of home by presenting it as a fragile, shifting entity shaped by historical and personal struggle.