The Vietnam Project Summary

Dusklands is the combination of J.M. Coetzee's two stories, "The Vietnam Project" and "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee." Although three hundred years apart in their plot lines, the stories explore the eternal concepts of power struggles through both physical and emotional intimidation.

The narrator of the story introduces himself as Eugene Dawn, who is compiling a report called the New Life Project that covers the role of propaganda used by the United States during the Vietnam War. Eugene labors over his report, trying to incorporate his own need for free expression with the needs of his supervisor, Coetzee, to criticize both form and content.

Eugene feels that Coetzee should be better able to manage creative people, having been one himself at one time. Coetzee, however, has moved into management and has taken on the critical and sometimes impersonal...