Running for Your Life: Notes About Coetzee’s “The Schooldays of Jesus”

Herein lies the message of the strange villain Dimitri in Coetzee’s “Schooldays”: He is the person paralyzed by guilt, something that is at the core, and he knows it; that it can’t be fobbed off on his sad, lonely childhood, that it (the feeling of being unloved by your own flesh and blood) is not the driver of Dimitri’s tragedy, when in a fit of madness (unhinged passion, because, what, pray tell, do we REALLY know about what the human heart is capable of doing, both in grace and evil) he strangles his one true love who has miraculously come to him.

Technique to study: Simon, the narrator, the everyman, without him we don’t live as fully the extremes of the other characters, who like electrons swirl around, bombarded by stimuli, and we, the readers, are the neutron, the neutral being. Simon is simple, ordinary. We are moved to feeling for him, of course. Someone we can relate to; and perhaps more important, feel superior to. (The mass appeal message of the performance show that with The Simpsons made Fox TV what it is today: American Idol.)

Next: Running for Your Life: Street Book Pathway