Heroism In The Dishonor

"I do not want to die in the state I am in, a state of ugliness. I want to be saved. How shall I be saved? By doing what I do not want to do. That is the first step: that I know. I must love, first of all, the unlovable" ( Age of Iron 136).
Elizabeth Curren starts her narrative by telling two incidents: a homeless man whom she depicts resting on her belongings and "the news from Dr. Syfret" that her cancer has metastasized to the bone. This mysterious opening replicates the dim minute in the South African past enclosed by the fiction the time of its writing, 1986-89. Mrs. Curren as a storyteller is sated in this current time border to present witness proof on the wounded of racial violence in the declining times to the apartheid government.

Dishonor is state and emotion, reverse to a condition of elegance. The symbol of ashes seats humiliation of the kind of purpose knowledge along with the offense of racial detestation for which it is repaired, and thus creates it more touchable than respect. Having evaluations her offense and her reparation, Mrs. Curren next diverts how one might be saved by heroism. She thinks the idea of heroism once previous, after Bheki was murdered and she imagines an impressive self-immolation in front of an administration house. But afterward she discloses in a passage of directed text,
There was always something false about that impulse, deeply false, no matter to what rage or despair it answered. If dying in bed over weeks and months, in a purgatory of pain and shame, will not save my soul, why should I be saved from dying in two minutes in a pillar of flames? Will the lies stop because a sick old woman kills herself? Whose life will be changed, and how? (141).
Thus the heroic work should tolerate consequences as stunning as the sacrifice itself, in this case, ending the dishonesty and altering life. She comes back to the model of heroism in the perspective of John 's death:
What the times call for is quite different from goodness. The times call for heroism. A word that, as I speak it, sounds foreign to my lips. I doubt that I have ever used it before, even in a lecture. Why not? Perhaps out of respect. Perhaps out of shame I

Yet it has been deaths who hug her. Coetzee focuses to text as his sense to discover the conditions of awareness and coma in social and historic situations unfavorable in the life of the brain. South Africa offers him a structure of location for such situations where authority has been imposed throughout injustice, racism, and uncontrolled violence. Because the structure of apartheid in South Africa regulates to far too numerous other places, we readers who exist outer that the kingdom might see ourselves among those who either mistreatment our authority or winner rational life. This option is qualitatively unlike from those options countenanced by Coetzee’s central character, which will not postpone to either location and in its places generates places between detachment posts. Whether Coetzee thinks a universal political idea, for example, imperialism in Waiting for the Barbarians, or a particular case such as