Roland Barthes thinks the pronoun “he” is the “nastiest word in the language.” It is the “pronoun of the non-person, it annuls and mortifies its referent; it cannot be applied without uneasiness to someone one loves.” What a strange challenge, then, to tell an autobiography in the third-person, making a non-person out of the person we know best. When J. M. Coetzee narrates Boyhood, he uses the “he” and the present tense to create a diachronic identity: two selves which are simultaneously entwined and disjoined.
We associate autobiography with the first-person. “I” is an appropriate and honest pronoun because it supports the one-to-one alignment of narrator and protagonist. After all, J. M. Coetzee writes about J. M. Coetzee; and is not Mr. Coetzee one and the same man? Using the third-person breaks this alignment and separates selfhood. It asserts that, indeed, the Coetzees are separate figures: one an author function or narrator and the other a story character. Boyhood emphasizes this difference by using strictly impersonal pronouns, calling the protagonist “he” and “himself” but never “John.” We usually say that employing the third-person increases journalistic merit, infusing a sense of fact and objectivity into the narrative. But autobiography presents a special case. Why would we doubt a narrator’s ability to access interiority and personal details when he is telling about his own life? Using “he” instead of “I” seems awkward, even disingenuous: splicing apart the self by way of verbal cues. It denies the referent and removes an outer shell of personhood.
But Coetzee, in his concern over the split identity, implies that even first-person narration is dishonest. In fact, using the “he” might better reflect the notion that, narratologically, it is hard to recount the truth. The young Coetzee of Boyhood exists as one entity, with a unique set of emotions and biases and perceptions; the old Coetzee who narrates exists as another, with a separate set of mental constructs. The latter must render the former through the filter of memory. But perfect reproduction is not possible, because time and situation and the vagueness of recollection intervene. Therefore, the first-person makes a promise it cannot keep: namely, that we can inhabit fully our past selves.
Coetzee’s narrative choices more accurately represent the nature of memory. An older self and a younger self exist together in the present tense, as a sign of their inevitable connection. Meanwhile impersonal pronouns remind us of a divide. Although events unfold in the present, the narrator has no control over them. He cannot make decisions in real-time because real-time belongs to the level of story, not to the level of discourse. Using “I” suggests agency and an ability to change the course of events. Using “he” reminds us that memory consists, not in changing and determining, but observing what came before. Therefore Coetzee creates a strange sort of diachronic identity: a common verb tense establishes a principle of simultaneity, which third-person language then splits into two. It is the phenomenon of being an outsider to oneself. Psychology calls this depersonalization; Barthes calls it the affliction of the “non-person” pronoun.
We see this same double identity written into the syntactic ambiguity of “he.” When the narrator names multiple characters in the space of a paragraph, referents can become unclear. He says: “Even before he knew his father, that is to say, before his father returned from the war, he had decided he was not going to like him” (43). We imagine that Coetzee is doing the deciding and that his father is the unlikeable one, but overlapping pronouns permit other interpretations. “He” erases the distance between two characters and collapses separate identities into a single person. Indeed, Coetzee likes cricket and rugby and the United Party, just as his father does (43). Yet “he does not like his father.” Common interests and common pronouns signal a common identity. But the pronouns are anonymous and impose distance: they suggest that the father is absent, that in some sense he and the young Coetzee are strangers. Identity bifurcates once more to reveal two people with so many lines of affiliation who yet remain quite unlike and apart. The third-person summarily brings people together, only to show us how imprecisely they coexist.
Barthes says that the “he” is also epic, and Coetzee’s narrative affirms this view. For although the events he describes are ordinary (a boy goes to school, talks with friends at recess, and delights in riding a bicycle), the way he describes them borrows from epic conventions. Coetzee often refers to figures from antiquity. He “becomes” a Roman Catholic because he admires “Horatius and his two comrades, swords in their hands, crested helmets on their heads, indomitable courage in their glance” (20). He meditates on desire and lust through comparisons to “Daphne pursued by Apollo; Persephone ravished by Dis” (56). These are the people who influence his life; and to a degree, they dictate the stature of his experience. As a result, school canings become great and terrifying events, inspiring shame that might befit a fallen “prince” (12); and the young Coetzee envisions his death more than once. Mindful of such a high purpose (“That is what he would like to be: a hero” (25)), the narrator fits his story into the form of an epic, with all the trappings of grandeur and difficulty and rites of passage. And so again, diachronic identity becomes important. The young Coetzee, transitory and fragile being that he is, becomes immortalized in a story. His personal “I” becomes a universal “he,” the marker of an archetype or representative figure; and his experiences become the cardinal functions of a plot. This is what it means to write autobiography, after all. For the man who tells about his life makes it important enough to transcribe and endure in time. And in so doing, he generates a new and narrativized self – like the self that is telling, but not the same – and bestows it to the generations.