Dogs, horses, and red herrings: The animal in J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus

J. M. Coetzees fiction has variously spoken to the idea of the animal, particularly through the figure of the dog, as an object of human empathy. This empathetic engagement with the animal has implications for the relationships between human beings. However, in The Childhood of Jesus (2013), we see a conceptual shift in which the animal is used to explore an oppositional binary that could loosely be described as the corporeal versus the otherworldly or spiritual.