This article aims to join a growing number of studies which examine how animals, especially dogs, are used in J.M. Coetzee's celebrated novel Disgrace (2000). Disgrace exposes in a unique manner the connections between the moral issues of animal rights and the ethical issues of the post-apartheid state. By focusing on the role of animals not as metaphors but rather as characters in the novel, as real as its human characters, the article reveals parallel motifs shared by humans and animals, such as sacrifice and grief. In this way the novel allows the Eurocentric white protagonist David Lurie to regain his moral legitimacy. The animal, therefore, is used here as a surrogate medium which, by its innate innocence, displaces white guilt and racial violence into moral privilege in the field of animal welfare.
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