The Greatness of Freedom: Michael K’s Lifelong Desire to be United with the Inseparable Root in J.M Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K

Abstract

This paper critically explores some of the post-colonial experiences with the lens of the latest psychoanalytic theories. By giving a deconstructive reading of the text Life and Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee, the article relates the psychological and other troubles of the central character Michael K who lives in a post-colonial Africa, with the psychological troubles of an individual in the Lacanian ‘Symbolic Order’ where the child faces similar sort of alienation and emptiness after the biggest separation from its mother . To explain the experience of the endless attempt of the individual in particular and the colonized society in general to meet the unconscious that is, the desire to be in fullness of power in the imaginary world with the mother or the pre-colonial states, this paper’s literary review section discusses Lacanian ‘Mirror Stage,’ Freudian psychoanalysis, nationalism, decolonization and existentialism and relates them with the main argument. Divided mainly into three parts, this paper firstly shows the conflicts rose following the imposition of the colonial or patriarchal rules. Then, it describes the process of the natives’ turning back to the innocence or the precolonial state to face the trauma and finally elaborates how, when the conflicts are unresolved, the problems become unavoidable which symbolize the unending colonizer-colonized relationship as complex and frustrating.