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Coetzee has always had ambivalent feelings about South Africa: he wants to escape from it but remains an indispensable part of his life. He summarized South African society as a master slave society in Doubling the Point: Essays and Interview (1992), that is:

In a society of masters and slaves, no one is free. The slave is not free, because he is not his own master; the master is not free, because he cannot do without the slave. For centuries South Africa was a society of masters and serfs; now it is a land where the serfs are in open rebellion and the masters are in disarray. (96)

South Africa is where he desperately wants to escape. The first four chapters of the novel Youth describe John’s life in Cape Town, South Africa. In his description, readers cannot feel a bit of nostalgia for the country but the urgent feelings of leaving his family and his hometown. All three of Coetzee’s autobiographical novels are subtitled “Scenes from the Provincial Life”. As a cultural concept, the word “province” originated in Paris and originally referred to people living outside Paris (Wang, “Symbolic Meanings of Coetzee’s Works” 70). Therefore, for Coetzee, South Africa is as much a province of life as London. South Africa was a tiny, remote corner of the world’s center, a small unattractive place compared with London. Before he went to London, he tried to delve many famous English writers such as Flaubert, Pound, and Eliot as well as their works, so that he would not arrive in Europe as “a provincial bumpkin” (Coetzee, Youth 25). When Coetzee prepared to leave South Africa, he was also touched by the riots there.

2.2 Cultural Shock at the Center of Empire

From the diasporic perspective, contemporary cultural practices produce narratives that are necessarily transnational. Thus, the experience of diaspora, migration, and crossing borders can “provide us with new forms of narrative or, in the words of John Berger, with other ways of telling” (Sais, 266). The interpretation of Western culture and politics from the perspective of Western centralism over glorifies the civilization at the center of empire. As a colonial diaspora, Coetzee felt the impact of civilization at the center of the empire, revealing the hypocrisy of imperialism and breaking the myth of colonialism. Being in the center of a prosperous empire, he became a marginal person in London, which is precisely the result of his difficulty in the collision and fusion between the Western colonial culture and the local culture of South Africa. British poetry and art, once longed for, are now a distant fantasy. The impact of imperial civilization also made Coetzee a spiritual “Oliver Twist”.

2.2.1 Spiritual “Oliver Twist” in London

A young South African who studied mathematics and was obsessed with literature, came to England with a devout heart to pursue his dream, but made himself a spiritual “Oliver Twist” in the cold London. John longed to find love, but found it exhausting; In the face of happiness, he thought that happiness has no benefits to people, but accepting and enduring pains could reach the other side of art. He fled South Africa with the growing racial strife, trying to escape the memories of the shame and abashment,本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。