Towards a narrative identity in Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor

Abstract

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003, Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor enjoyed a positive reception from reviewers as an incisive, if bleak, portrait of post-apartheid South Africa and its failure to realize the idealistic promises of “rainbow nationalism.” It also drew criticism from some scholars who argued that it attracted prestige and recognition precisely by pandering to the neocolonial values of a conservative metropolitan readership and its predilection for works which portend the demise of the former British colony. In this article, I offer a close reading of The Good Doctor that contests its reception as an opportunistic disseminator of post-apartheid disillusionment, and argue instead that it offers a scrupulous interrogation of the forms of vocalization and self-fashioning available to white South Africans in the aftermath of apartheid. In accounting for the emphasis Galgut places on the ongoing labour of self-interpretation in this context, I turn to the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur whose work on narrative identity, I demonstrate, strongly resonates with the value The Good Doctor finds in a hermeneutically examined life.

Keywords: Damon Galgut, The Good Doctor, post-apartheid literature, narrative identity