This Nobel Prize Winner Has a Really Strange Theory About Consciousness (Level 1)

In 2003, the writer J.M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Instead of a normal speech, he told a strange story. The story was about two men: an old sailor and his reporter. The sailor is Robinson Crusoe, a famous character from a book. The reporter is Daniel Defoe, the writer who created Crusoe. In the story, Crusoe stays alone in his room. He learns about the world only from Defoe's reports. But the two men do not really know each other. This story makes us think about our own lives. We have two parts: the part that experiences life and the part that thinks about it. Sometimes, like Crusoe, we only know the world through the stories we tell ourselves. In the end, we are both the writer and the character in our own story.