| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 96 === Abstract
This thesis attempts to explore the characteristic of ambivalence in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. In the novel, characters are oscillating between the subject and the object, self and other, the colonizer and the colonized so much that ambivalence can be permeated and elucidated in the novel. For example, the Magistrate oscillates between the colonizer and the colonized. At the same time, the Empire in the novel seems to emerge in a form of ambivalence. So, ambivalence is salient in this novel that we must recall Homi K. Bhbhba’s observation that the colonizer or the colonized no longer maintains each own entity under the predicament of the ambivalence.
As to the ambivalent position in which Coetzee stands, the term ambivalence can be sufficiently identified throughout his historical background and works. Thus, ambivalence can serve and support the framework of this thesis. Coetzee’s ambivalence is to vacillate between to be or not to be Afrikaner in South Africa. His position and writing skills are replete with ambivalent characteristics resulting in his remarkable style, which implies his thoughts in his works. Coetzee’s ambivalent position as well as the Magistrate’s projects into Waiting for the Barbarians as a pivotal characteristic of the novel.
Postcolonial ambivalence can be the best title to describe Coetzee’s ambivalence between South Africa and Europe, the colonizer and the colonized so as to echo with Bhabha’s theory of ambivalence, so much so that the characteristics of ambivalence can profoundly reflect in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.
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