Disgrace: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

One morning while watching geese, Lucy asks David if he has any plans to find a new teaching job, but he tells her that nobody would hire him. Even if he advocated for himself, he claims, society is no longer willing to hear his excuses. Curious why he thinks nobody would listen, Lucy asks him to state his “case” for why he had an affair with Melanie, and he says, “My case rests on the rights of desire.” He then reminds her of a dog that used to live next to them when she was a child. Whenever this dog saw a female dog, it would get excited, so the owners would beat it. As such, every time it saw a female, it would get both excited and scared. David says he always found this “ignoble,” suggesting that it would have been kinder to simply kill the dog.

As Lucy and David continue their walk, they pass three unfamiliar men. “Should we be nervous?” David asks, and Lucy says she isn’t sure. However, the men simply pass them by, but when Lucy and David return to the farmhouse, they find them standing in the yard. Lucy calls out for Petrus, but he’s nowhere to be seen. One of the men then says that he needs to use the house’s phone because one of their sisters is giving birth. Reluctantly, Lucy goes inside with two of the strangers while David stays outside with youngest of the three. As soon as Lucy and the men disappear, though, David knows something is amiss, so he calls for Lucy to come back outside. Just as he’s about to follow, though, he hears the front door lock. 

The boy near David starts running to the other side of the house, so David lets Katy off her leash to chase him. Unfortunately, though, Katy is too slow. As for himself, David runs to the kitchen door and kicks it in, but as soon as he enters the house, something hits him hard on the head and he loses consciousness, eventually waking up to find himself locked in the bathroom. “Lucy!” he screams, but he’s unable to kick down the door. Still, he continues to call her name until a man comes into the bathroom and takes his car keys before locking him in again. He then watches out the window as the men pace in the backyard with Lucy’s rifle, which they use to murder the cooped-up dogs.

The next time the bathroom door opens, David rushes out, but one of the men trips him and douses him in liquid. He then hears a match ignite and is suddenly “bathed in cool blue flame.” Horrified, he swats at his face and listens as his hair catches fire, quickly moving back into the bathroom and throwing toilet water on himself. “Lucy!” he screams once he extinguishes the flames on his body. The three men, it seems, have driven off in his car. Eventually, Lucy appears in the bathroom door. She is in a bathrobe and her hair is wet, but she shows little emotion, simply walking out to the dog pens and surveying the carnage. After seeing this, she shuts herself in the bathroom and tells David not to enter, refusing to answer whether or not she’s all right.

The farmhouse is trashed, and the three strangers have stolen many items, but David can only think about Lucy. Lucy, on the other hand, remains calm, informing her father that she’s walking to her neighbor Ettinger’s house to get help. Before she leaves, she says, “You tell what happened to you, I tell what happened to me.” At first, David doesn’t understand what she means, and then he tells her that she’s “making a mistake” by refusing to talk about what happened to her, though she simply says, “No I’m not.” Overcome, David says, “My child, my child!” and embraces her, but she is “stiff” and unresponsive in his arms.