Disgraced

Responsibility is a major question throughout the novel that is never answered. First off the trials and committees’ which are meant to define responsibility and justice, are just a joke. Rosalind explains the trails “are not about principles, they are about how well you put yourself across.” (188). By Rosalind’s statement since the trails are not about principles, they cannot be about responsibility either but rather how one performs. Therefore the justice system cannot be the authority on what or who is responsible. The police are another authority figure that is compromised in the story. When the police recover the wrong car and set the culprits free on bail before David gets there reveals the incompetence of the police as and the fact that they will not catch Lucy’s rapists. By compromising the institutions of authority, Coetzee shows that institutions are not equipped to deal with who or what is responsible.
Since institutions cannot deal with responsibility, Coetzee then questions the responsibility of the individual. David is the character who has the most complex relationship with responsibility especially when comparing his affair with Melanie and how he sees the rapists. While David places blame for what happened to Lucy on the Rapists and Petrus there is the question of his own responsibility with his affair with Melanie. When David thinks of the rape he can place himself as the rapists “if he concentrates, if he losses himself, be there be the men, inhabit them” but “the questions is, does he have it in him to be the woman?” (160). David is able to connect more with the rapists than the victim which does beg the question if he recognizes that his treatment of women, particularly his relationship with Melanie, has often been abusive with him as the abuser. At one point when David goes to see Melanie and begins having sex with her, David rationalizes “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless” (25). At least at one point in the novel, David committed the same violation that he hates the other men for and even though he tries to avert that point, there are parallels. The paradox is then, can David hold the men responsible for what happening to his daughter and not himself for what he did to Melanie, another man’s daughter.