Abstract

The everyday is not “ordinary” and everyman is in fact an active struggler rather than a passive onlooker who is invited to accept passively what is imposed upon him in any sense. The second half of the 20^th century began to witness a change in the perspectives relating the position and definition of the everyday and everyman. Accordingly, Wittengstein tried to make us realise the remarkable nature of everyday language while De Certeau and Boerdieu tried to re-define the daily life based on strategies, tactics and socialized nature of the meaning of behaviour.

J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man explores the life of an every(day) man, Paul Rayment, who loses his leg after an accident and feels compelled to change his previous lonely life with a newer life in the care of Marijana, his young and beautiful beloved nurse. Coetzee’s novel pursues how Paul makes use of tactics and strategies of everyday life and depicts how extraordinary an ordinary man could be. The novel’s focus on the “common hero” also signifies the turn of recent postmodernist fiction to humanistic issues and questions the meaning of life as well as aging while forcing the reader to revise his/her hidden otherness.