Crippling Story: Disability and Storytelling in J. M. Coetzee s Slow Man

This article explores disability as a trope of storytelling in by J. M. Coetzee‟s 2005 novel Slow Man. Although much has been written on the novel‟s narrative experiments, very little criticism to date has examined the question of disability in the novel. This article aims to remedy this gap and offers a close reading of the novel that brings together the trope of disability and metafictional elements in the novel. The protagonist‟s disability and insistent refusal of prosthesis becomes the central metaphor for narrational impairment. The novel unfolds in a sequence of covering and recovering an originary lack, beginning with the supposed author Elizabeth Costello‟s intervention to revitalize her tedious story, followed by a series of other transgressions. This article argues that the theme of disability allows for the examination of fictionality, subverting the power of the writer and exposing the inner workings and problems of fiction writing. It gives the novel a mode of structural freedom while violating the modes of fiction and bringing it to the point of collapse.