The title of Coetzee's fourth novel, Life and Times of Michael K (1983), announces a challenge. It alludes directly to a tradition of thinking about individual identity in relation to history – ‘The Life and Times’ – which is represented in a variety of genres, including the historical novel and the Bildungsroman, as well as non-fictional modes such as the political memoir. Life and Times of Michael K proclaims itself as having an involvement with this tradition in which the individual life is held to interact intimately with social and political development. The challenge is that the novel ironically undermines the association by presenting the life of an anti-hero who resists all obvious contact with the social and political milieu.

Despite this dynamic, there is some sense of political urgency in the conception of this novel when set against the vagueness – in the time and setting – of its predecessor, Waiting for the Barbarians (even though there are strategic reasons for that elusiveness): the new novel is set in modern South Africa, at a time of revolution. Neither is this merely future projection. The scenes of Michael K Kevoke the social breakdown of post-Soweto South Africa in the 1980s, just as the novel's themes represent governing fears and concerns of the time. The operations of Umkhonto we Sizwe (the military wing of the ANG) are of especial significance. The most dramatic action, in a campaign of strategic bombings, was the attack against the SASOL oil-from-coal plants in June 1980, part of a series of acts of symbolic resistance which are representative of the historical background evoked through the setting of guerilla warfare in the novel.