Narrative levels and textual layers in J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Diary of a Bad Year (2007)

J.M. Coetzee is directly or indirectly always concerned with the multi-layered narrative texts problematising the concept of authorship and narration. This study treats the two novels as "narrative texts" and "textual narratives" simultaneously. From a postclassical narratological perspective, the study investigates the narrators and narrative levels in J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Diary of a Bad Year (2007), two sophisticated narratives with authors without authority. The characters in these novels occupy the roles of authors, narrators, and characters with remarkable intellectual, self-conscious and reflective capabilities. The implied author, playing with the evasive links between the biographical connotations and fictional denotations, elucidates the fictional status of the novels regarding various narrative and authorial strategies. The study aims to reveal that both novels complicate the narrative levels and narrative voices, and further incorporates them with that of the implied author. The study, therefore, foregrounding the narratological insights into literary representation of the characters, narrators and fictional authors, explores how Coetzee questions the notions of fiction and history, textuality and metatextuality amalgamating the elements of narrative representation, writing, ideology, politics (ecopolitics) and literary theory. The thesis concludes that Coetzee undermines the hierarchical concepts and binary oppositions (textual, fictional, cultural, historical) assumed or produced through the act of writing or representation.