Experiments in inhumanity

Experiments in Inhumanity utilises for its setting the recognisable suburban backdrop of a mid to late nineties and early 21st century Cape Town and Pretoria. It focuses its attention around a specific white, middle class experience within pop-culture, making many references to music, television and film. In so doing it enters the debate as to how influential pop culture may be on teen behaviour, such as violence within relationships and peer groups. It throws elements like morose suburban existence, family dynamics and dysfunctional behaviour (specifically of a sexual nature) into the melting pot and attempts thereby to illustrate a fictional situation, which illuminates how youth culture might produce juvenile delinquency. It follows the lives of siblings Michael and Alison and gives a window into the formative years of these characters as they struggle to find and sustain meaningful relationships. The characters' problems stem from a sexually traumatic incident in childhood. The novel investigates how, faced with the same starting point, the two characters achieve vastly different outcomes. The novel uses German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of Eternal Recurrence as a motif, suggesting a repetitive, cyclical experience in the lives of the characters. It supposes a finite set of events recurring over an infinite time span. It also experiments with narrative structure, breaking up a predictable - or expected - chronology while still attempting to retain a well-structured, suspenseful plot. The seemingly out-of-sync chronology has the purpose of reflecting the confusion inherent in the lives of the characters, as they attempt to reconstruct or extract meaning from a tortured existence.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Department of English Language and Literature

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Pretorius, Werner

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/10702

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/10702