The intimacy with which we come to know David Lurie is not unusual it is our understanding of him that can be, at times, unsettling. The story is told through free indirect discourse. We see everything through David’s scope of experience so that we know his every thought. It is impossible to support many of his actions yet though the way it is told the narrative forces us to understand how he has come to such conclusions. This is illustrated in our disturbing and unnerving understanding of Melanie Isaacs’ rape.
The author establishes in the first line of the novel, how we are to read David Lurie. “For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well” (1). We, as readers, are forced to see the entire novel through David’s eyes but this first line offers us judgment. “To his mind” implies that he has actually not solved the problem, he only thinks he has. We are immediately told that this character is flawed and though we know his thoughts we are not expected to approve of them. While the narrator places us on David’s shoulder we are given permission to form our own opinions and disagree with him. From the beginning we are able to pass judgment, however as the story continues our feelings toward the character become complicated as our understanding of him grows.
Our relationship to David’s thoughts and our personal view on his actions are in conflict with one another. It is undeniable that David rapes Melanie despite his description. “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core.” (25). Unwanted intercourse is rape. We judge him for this action because he has committed a crime. He has abused another person in an irredeemable way. Though we know this, through David, we can see that his action does not come from a place of violence, anger or the intent to control Melanie. He romanticizes the entire experience. He says “Strange love! Yet from the quiver of Aphrodite, goddess of the foaming waves, no doubt about that,” (25). Also “I was no longer a fifty-year-old divorcé at a loose end. I became a servant of Eros.” (52). By invoking these gods we can see that to him this was passionate. He felt passionate and swept away by emotion. He removes responsibility from himself by romanticizing his urges. He was shot by an arrow that he couldn’t escape. Rape is reprehensible yet because we understand how David feels and are privy to his every thought we can see how he justifies it. He explains it as human nature.
On page 90 he tells a story about a dog being beaten but from this we see David’s opinion on desire and individual nature. “No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts.” “But at the deepest level I think it might have preferred being shot […] on the one hand to deny its nature, on the other to spend the rest of its days padding around the living-room, sighing and sniffing the cat and getting portly.” David clearly sympathizes with this dog. He believes that it is a crime to force someone to deny nature. It is better to die than to feel trapped because you hate yourself. Because we can see how David explains himself and his reasoning for following his desire, our feelings about his actions become murky. What he did was wrong but don’t we all fear the prison of not following our nature. By allowing us to understand David we are able to see his fears and empathize with them yet still despise his actions. This is how we are manipulated by free indirect discourse. It is extremely uncomfortable and unsettling to understand David’s motives but it seems to be the point when it comes to this character.
South African Literature After Apartheid 