In his lectures on the way humans treat animals at Princeton University, John Coetzee chose to tell his audience a short fictional story about Elizabeth Costello, an elderly writer. Costello is invited to lecture at Appleton College on any topic she wishes, which turns out to involve animals. At first, using a story in a lecture seemed to be interesting, but a story about a novelist giving a lecture shouldn't be more interesting than a lecture given by Coetzee himself. Considering the controversy that usually arises from a discussion on animal rights, it is also likely that Coetzee chose Costello as speaker instead of him because he wanted to distance himself from the discussion on that topic and be able to highlight the weaknesses in Costello's arguments. This observation is probable, but one question remains: why Costello? Coetzee must have some reason to have his protagonist, an elderly writer, lecture on animal rights, a topic on which she is not an expert. By designing his protagonist as an elderly writer who has trouble getting along with her son's family and clarifying her thoughts, Coetzee placed Costello and the animals in the same position of being discriminated against by other people to underline the idea that animals may be able to reason but cannot communicate with humans effectively. As an older writer, Costello becomes "the other" to the Appleton community, just as animals are considered "the other" by humans. The number one thing that separates Costello from the Appleton community is his age. Being an older woman, Costello does not belong to the same group as her audience, who are mostly university students......center of card......tagonist of those around her who point out that humans do not they pay a lot of attention to the issue of animals. Seeing that Coetzee can support his idea not primarily with logical arguments but with a fictional story should make us realize that human beings, no matter how proud we are of our ability to reason, can use something unreal to strengthen an argument. Therefore, we should not believe in our superiority due to the belief that reasonableness is a unique characteristic of human beings because we do not know if there are other ways of "reasoning". It's possible that, if animals are capable of reasoning, they do so in much the same way as Coetzee or Costello. The only reason we ignore it is that we hold too closely to what we believe is true "reasoning." Works Cited Coetzee, JM and Amy Gutmann. The life of animals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999. Print.