The Shadow of a Word reconfigures our understanding of allegory in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and philosophy. This book is focused on the works of a single author as it is interested in elaborating upon the intricacies of the term allegory rather than the variety of its forms in contemporary literature. However, the findings of this book are pertinent to the works of various other contemporary authors. J.M. Coetzee, the South African novelist who was awarded the Nobel prize in 2003, is the sole focus of this study because his fiction offers a singular point of access to study the structure of allegory and allegorical thinking in the contemporary world shaped by the histories of colonial and racial violence. Despite the centrality of allegory and allegorical thinking in postcolonial fiction and criticism, this issue has received surprisingly little attention in recent scholarship, even though it is a powerful theoretical operator for many scholars.