The Disgraceful Secret of Professor David Lurie

I enjoyed reading Disgrace. It was very different from what we have been reading so far in class. I felt as though this novel went a lot deeper, it was something that our generation could connect more towards. Not saying that everyone would be able to personally relate to these characters, but they are dealing with issues that we have at least read about in the news.

I found the construction of Professor David Lurie’s character very interesting. In the first sentence of the novel we find out what David Lurie holds as important information the reader needed to know, “For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well” (1). In the first chapter and throughout the entire novel the reader follows David through his sexual experiences to find out more about his character. The first thing that the reader realizes about the character is that he will take sex where he can get it. From Soraya to Melanie, not saying he did not find these two women extremely alluring, because he did. But, one must look at who these women are. Soraya a prostitute and Melanie is a student of David’s. He finds the chase extremely thrilling. Take his relationship with Soraya. He confuses their relationship with one that a couple would have together. In realty their relationship was a contract. He is constantly chasing her and trying to get more out of her, “He likes giving her presents. At New York he gave her an enameled bracelet, at Eid a little malachite heron that caught his eye in a curio shop. He enjoys her pleasure, which is quite unaffected” (5). David finds himself in inappropriate situations because he confuses his relationships. When David and Soraya’s contract is terminated he then moves to Melanie. When reading the interactions between these two characters, David becomes a predator. Even during their first interaction, David’s nature becomes forceful. He has to persuade her to come into his house, stay for dinner, and later to stay over, “’I’m going to invite you to do something reckless.’ He touches her again. ‘Stay. Spend the night with me.’ Across the rim of her cup she regards his steadily. ‘Why?’ ‘Because you ought to.’ ‘Why ought I to?’ ‘Why? Because a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it’” (16). He must convince, in a very forceful nature to get her to stay, to sleep with him. In this instance he confuses a nice evening of friendly conversation with one a lustrous one. At first I thought of David as a gross old man who was trying to get his goods where ever he could find them. But, the more I think about it I find him lonely. In the being of the novel he says, “It surprises him that ninety minutes a week of a woman’s company are enough to make him happy, who used to think he needed a wife, a home, a marriage” (5). David’s use of women convinces him that he no longer needs those things, but I would argue he does. Through the novel he bounces from woman to woman, finding less and less pleasure from it. I would argue that he is empty because not only his misuse of women but he looking to fulfill a void he cannot fill from the women he gets into relationships with.