the impression that David is incapable of facing the seriousness of his situation. He remains sarcastic even when he has to face the inquiry: “I am sure the members of the committee have better things to do with their time than rehash a story over which there will be no dispute. I plead guilty to both charges. Pass the sentence, and let us go on with our lives.” 2 Lurie pleads guilty to the charge of sexual harassment but refuses to apologize and must leave the university in disgrace. While he fails to gain sympathy due to his (intellectual) arrogance his daughter Lucy seems to be in a better position of winning over the reader. Lucy runs a smallholding in the countryside and grows and sells produce and flowers at a weekly market for a living. David takes refuge at her place after his “disgrace” and finds his child as “[…] no longer a child playing at farming but a solid countrywoman […]” ³ . As a result of depending on nature Lucy is, in mere contradiction to her father, open-minded, respectful and grounded. For a short time, his daughter’s influence and natural rhythms of the farm even seem to harmonise David’s discordant and restless life. But after they’ve become victims of a violent and vicious assault by three black men, David and Lucy are left shaken and further estranged. While her father desperately demands for justice and urges her to sell the farm believing that the attackers might return, Lucy seems to understand what David cannot. She tells him that living where she lives requires tolerating brutalisation and humiliation and simply keep going. Lucy further insists that living with such danger is the price she has to pay for the right to remain on the land as an unmarried and white woman:

“Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at a ground level. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity […] Like a dog.” 4

Lucy appears as a much stronger personality than David who constantly struggles with his life and while he somehow flees from his disgrace his daughter is not willing to give up and resign that easily:

² J.M. Coetzee: Disgrace, first published in Great Britain, Berkshire 1999, page 48.

³ J.M. Coetzee: Disgrace, first published in Great Britain, Berkshire 1999, page 60.

⁴ J.M. Coetzee: Disgrace, first published in Great Britain, Berkshire 1999, page 205.