Literary Analysis Of The Smell Of Apples

The Smell of Apples set the vision of a well-balanced white South African family’s lives, throughout the Apartheid period against the novel’s oversight, chronical, negation and manipulation. The novel embodies two narratives; the longer narrative is the version of a ten-year old boy, Marnus Erasmus and the voice of the sub narrative that interrupts the longer narrative, who is involved in a bush war in Angola, at the end of each chapter. The younger narrator tells the story of his youth in Kalk Bay, near Cape Town during the 1970’s where he resided with his parents and sister. Providing an unimpeachable version and the ideal lens through which to view a society in a degrading fashion. Employed to unmask the terrible outcome of depraved fatherly and militaristic authority in a privilege upper class Afrikaner family, is a double narrative. The main narrative is about the young protagonist’s upbringing in Cape Town, a sub narrative presented as a war diary tells the story of the older

Portrayed as a victim of a powerful and manipulative paternalism that insidiously uses the son’s “admiration of the strength and his protection of the weakness of the father.” Both Marnus and Frikkie is intimidated into resignation to the fact that they can neither disobey against nor challenge the all-powerful Afrikaner military to get fairness. Marnus never revolts against his father. His approval of the Chilean general’s ornamental shoulder piece represents his compliance to his father, even after he had witnessed the rape of his friend. Frikkie, Marnus and Little Neville, as silent victims, driven to devastation by Johan Erasmus’s brand of militaristic patriarchy. Marnus’s compliance to the compulsive and horrific figure that is his father makes him abandon his own