SOURCE: "'Omnipotent Fantasies' of a Solitary Self: J. M. Coetzee's 'The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee'," in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2, 1993, pp. 48-65.

In the following essay, Marais argues "that J. M. Coetzee's novella 'The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee' … suggests as much about the ethnocentricity of early South African travel writing" as does early colonial literature.

Referring to early colonialist literature in general, Abdul JanMohammed makes the point that "Instead of being an exploration of the racial Other, such literature merely affirms its own ethnocentric assumptions, instead of actually depicting the outer limits of 'civilization', it simply codifies and preserves the structures of its own mentality". In this paper, I shall argue that J. M. Coetzee's novella "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee", which is presented as a travelogue from "the great age of exploration when the White man first made contact with the Native peoples...