Imagining the Other: J.M. Coetzee’s Fictional Ethics

The social and political relevance of fiction has recently been reasserted by the new ethical theory, which proposes an ethics of otherness. Yet rather than claiming that fiction rests upon ethical foundations, this chapter inverts the traditional understanding of the relationship between ethics and fiction to argue that ethics has a fictional element at its core. To demonstrate this principle, this chapter offers an understanding of the ethical role of J.M. Coetzee’s fiction-making process in Elizabeth Costello as one that participates in a “game of make-believe” according to Kendall L. Walton’s theory of fictionality. This understanding, in turn, allows for a more generative interpretation of the postscript to Elizabeth Costello—which has often been ignored or dismissed by scholars—as an active attempt to elicit an ethical response from the reader.