C., D. N., outsiders and contemporary issues

[Richard Fiero]

Bekah wrote:
>. .  .
>In TMoP Coetzee's Dostoevsky  is distinctly an outsider in St.
>Petersburg because he's been away for a few years and he's certainly
>in a different circle from the one he left.  He's the outsider in his
>son's life,  in the world of the terrorists.  He won't even contact
>his old friend Maykov (next chapter?).
>  . . .

TMoP's D seems to not only be an outsider in Petersburg but an 
outsider in his own skin suffering from Herbert Marcuse style alienation.

Pg 82  He gives a great groan of despair.  What am I to do? he 
thinks.  If I were only in touch with my heart, might it be given to 
me to know?  Yet it is not his heart he has lost touch with but the truth.

Pg 83  His is waiting for a sign, and he is betting (there is no 
grander word he dare use) that the dog is not the sign, is not a sign 
at all, is just a dog among many dogs howling in the night.  But he 
knows too that as long as he tries by cunning to distinguish things 
that are things from things that are signs he will not be 
saved.  That is the logic by which he will be defeated; and, feeling 
its iron hardness, he is at his wits' end, like a dog on a chain that 
breaks the teeth that gnaw it.  And beware, beware, he reminds 
himself: the dog on the chain, the second dog, is nothing in itself, 
is not an illumination, merely an animal likeness!

Pg 118  I should not be here therefore I should be here.  I will see 
nothing else therefore I will see all.  What sickness is this, what 
sickness of reasoning?