This blog is part of Assignment of Paper 203: Post colonial studies.
Personal Information:
Name: Sagarbhai Bokadiya
Batch: M.A. Sem 3 (2024–2026)
Roll No: 24
Enrolment Number: 5108240009
E-mail Address: sagarbokadiya513@gmail.com
Assignment Details:
Unit 2 – J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986)
Topic: Silence and Subalternity in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe
Paper Code: 22403
Paper: 203 – Postcolonial Studies
Submitted to: Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, MKBU, Bhavnagar
Date of Submission: 07 November 2025
Abstract
J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) rewrites Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to question the colonial logic of voice, authorship, and silence. Set within a postcolonial and metafictional framework, Coetzee’s novel explores how imperial narratives suppress subaltern voices and how literature itself participates in such silencing. Through its characters—Susan Barton, Friday, and the writer Foe—the novel dismantles the colonial assumption that truth belongs only to those who can speak and write. Friday, a tongueless slave, becomes the most haunting image of the subaltern—his silence resisting both comprehension and colonization. This paper examines Foe as a meditation on silence and subalternity, showing how Coetzee transforms the colonial adventure story into an ethical inquiry about representation and the limits of language. Using postcolonial theory as context, the discussion highlights how Foe challenges the authority of narrative, the ownership of experience, and the moral responsibilities of the writer.
Introduction: Writing Back to Empire
Postcolonial literature is often characterized by its attempt to “write back” to the canon of empire—to respond, resist, and reinterpret narratives that once justified colonial domination. J. M. Coetzee’s Foe is one of the most striking examples of this process. Published in 1986, during the final decade of apartheid South Africa, the novel reimagines Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719)—one of the foundational myths of Western imperial individualism.
In Robinson Crusoe, the Englishman’s survival on an island and his mastery over Friday represent the triumph of reason, labor, and language—the key pillars of colonial ideology. In Foe, Coetzee dismantles that myth. He places at the center a female narrator, Susan Barton, and transforms Friday into a tongueless figure whose silence cannot be interpreted. The writer Foe (a stand-in for Defoe) becomes a symbol of the Western author who seeks to turn experience into marketable narrative.
The novel’s title—Foe—signals both homage and opposition. Coetzee pays tribute to Defoe while positioning himself as his “foe,” rewriting the master’s tale from the perspective of the marginalized. Foe thus functions as both a literary and philosophical text: it investigates the politics of voice and the ethics of storytelling. The novel’s power lies in its refusal to “speak for” the silenced; instead, it exposes the impossibility and the violence of that very act.
Historical and Literary Context
To appreciate Coetzee’s intervention, it is essential to situate Foe within two overlapping contexts: the legacy of Defoe’s colonial fiction and the postcolonial crisis of South Africa.
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was not merely a tale of adventure; it was a symbolic narrative of Enlightenment man’s capacity to dominate nature and civilize others. The colonial logic of the eighteenth century assumed that reason and religion justified conquest. Friday’s conversion to Christianity and acquisition of English in Robinson Crusoe embody this ideological transformation: the native is saved by speech.
Coetzee’s South Africa, by contrast, was a nation in turmoil. Under apartheid, race-based oppression institutionalized silence: the majority Black population was politically voiceless, censored, and surveilled. Coetzee’s decision to retell a colonial myth was therefore politically charged. By removing Friday’s tongue, Coetzee literalized the process through which colonialism mutilates the subaltern’s capacity for self-expression.
At the same time, the novel’s metafictional form reflects the late-twentieth-century concern with the instability of language and the constructedness of history. Like other postmodern writers, Coetzee questions whether narrative can ever represent truth. But his purpose remains ethical: he uses postmodern form to reveal the moral responsibilities of writing in a world structured by inequality.
Friday’s Silence and the Subaltern Condition
Friday is the novel’s most haunting presence. From the moment Susan Barton meets him on the island, he is defined not by what he says but by what he cannot say. His tongue has been cut out, and no one knows by whom—Crusoe claims it was done by slave traders, though the truth remains uncertain. This ambiguity itself is significant: colonial history erases its own acts of violence.
In Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Friday’s speech marks his entry into civilization. In Coetzee’s Foe, Friday’s silence resists that entry. His voicelessness becomes a form of resistance against appropriation. Every attempt by Susan Barton to interpret his gestures or movements ends in frustration. She imagines his story—perhaps he was a prince, perhaps a victim of sacrifice—but Coetzee refuses to confirm any version.
This refusal mirrors Gayatri Spivak’s question in her famous essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? Spivak argues that the subaltern’s voice cannot be recovered within the structures of Western discourse, because those structures themselves define who can be heard. Coetzee dramatizes this dilemma: Friday’s silence is not simply absence but an ethical limit to interpretation. To “give voice” to him would be to commit another act of colonization.
The novel’s closing image—a diver discovering Friday’s body underwater, bubbles issuing from his mouth “bearing no sound”—is one of the most powerful representations of subalternity in literature. The image suggests that history itself is drowned, inaudible, and yet persistently present. Silence is not emptiness but a submerged testimony that challenges the arrogance of narrative mastery.
Susan Barton: Gender, Authorship, and the Anxiety of Representation
Susan Barton, the central narrator of Foe, embodies the struggles of both postcolonial and feminist subjectivity. As a castaway who becomes an author, she occupies an intermediate position between the colonizer’s authority and the colonized’s vulnerability.
Her effort to tell her story parallels the historical struggle of marginalized people—especially women—to inscribe themselves into public discourse. She writes letters to the novelist Foe, seeking his help in turning her island experiences into a book. But her story is repeatedly reshaped, edited, and doubted by Foe, who insists on conventionalizing her account to suit literary expectations. In this conflict between experience and authorship, Coetzee exposes how even sympathetic narratives risk silencing the very voices they claim to represent.
Susan’s attempts to interpret Friday’s silence are similarly revealing. She projects her own anxieties onto him, treating him alternately as a mystery to decode and as a metaphor for her moral conscience. Her compassion is genuine, but her interpretive authority remains shaped by colonial assumptions. Coetzee thus critiques liberal humanism: good intentions do not necessarily produce ethical representation.
At another level, Susan’s gender complicates the question of power. As a woman, she experiences exclusion from literary authorship; as a European, she possesses privilege over Friday. Coetzee situates her between oppression and complicity, forcing readers to confront the uncomfortable truth that even victims of one hierarchy can perpetuate another.
Foe: The Author as Colonizer
The character of Foe—representing Daniel Defoe—embodies the Western author who transforms raw experience into marketable fiction. When Susan sends her manuscript, Foe responds by rewriting, embellishing, and re-centering it around adventure and heroism. He demands pirates, cannibals, and resolutions—elements that will please readers but distort truth.
In this process, Coetzee allegorizes the colonial archive. Just as the empire collected, translated, and classified native cultures, so too does Foe collect and reshape experience into narrative order. Authorship becomes an act of power: to write is to define reality.
Susan’s confrontation with Foe thus mirrors the postcolonial struggle to reclaim authorship. She insists that her version—the “truth”—must remain unadorned, but Foe insists that without artifice there can be no story. Coetzee reveals the paradox: history itself is always narrated; it can never be pure fact. Yet acknowledging this does not absolve the writer of ethical responsibility.
Coetzee uses Foe’s literary manipulation to question the politics of storytelling: Who has the right to tell a story? Who benefits from it? What forms of violence does writing conceal behind its aesthetic beauty? These questions lie at the heart of both postcolonial and metafictional ethics.
Metafiction and the Ethics of Storytelling
Foe is not only a story about colonialism; it is also a story about storytelling. Its metafictional structure—letters, narrative fragments, shifting perspectives—reminds readers that every narrative is constructed. Coetzee does not let readers forget that they are reading a re-telling of Robinson Crusoe.
This self-awareness performs two functions. First, it exposes the mechanisms by which authority is produced in literature. Defoe’s confident realism gave his novel the aura of truth; Coetzee’s fragmented form destroys that illusion. Second, it transforms reading itself into an ethical act. The reader must learn to listen to silence, to recognize that interpretation can be an act of violence.
Coetzee’s technique reflects a broader postcolonial strategy of “decolonizing form.” Instead of adopting Western realism, he invents a narrative mode that foregrounds uncertainty and incompletion. This stylistic choice parallels the moral argument of the novel: just as Friday’s silence cannot be translated, so too the novel refuses closure. It ends not with resolution but with mystery—an acknowledgment of what cannot be said.
Colonialism, Power, and the Violence of Language
At its core, Foe is an inquiry into the relationship between power and language. Colonialism functioned not only through physical conquest but through linguistic domination—the imposition of names, laws, and narratives. Crusoe’s naming of the island, the sea, and Friday in Defoe’s novel exemplifies this process: to name is to possess.
Coetzee reverses this dynamic by stripping language of authority. In Foe, names lose certainty, and meaning becomes unstable. Friday’s mutilation reveals that speech itself can be a tool of oppression. Language, rather than liberating, becomes complicit in domination.
This linguistic skepticism resonates with post-structuralist thought, particularly the ideas of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Foucault’s notion of discourse as a system of power and Derrida’s concept of différance—meaning as always deferred—both illuminate Coetzee’s project. Yet Coetzee’s purpose remains moral rather than purely theoretical: he exposes how the colonial world’s obsession with “voice” and “reason” serves to silence those who fall outside its linguistic order.
Silence as Resistance
While silence often signifies oppression, Coetzee reclaims it as a possible mode of resistance. Friday’s muteness denies the colonizer the satisfaction of understanding or mastery. His silence cannot be commodified, written, or sold; it is his only remaining possession.
In one of the novel’s key moments, Susan imagines that Friday’s silence contains “the sound of the sea,” suggesting that beneath the surface of history lies an ocean of unspoken suffering. This imagery transforms silence from absence to presence—from emptiness to fullness.
Coetzee thus redefines resistance. In a world where speech is co-opted by power, silence can be the only authentic act of defiance. Yet this silence also demands ethical humility from the listener. The task of the postcolonial writer, Coetzee suggests, is not to “give voice” but to create space for listening—to acknowledge that some experiences remain irreducibly opaque.
Gendered Silences and Double Oppression
The novel’s exploration of silence also intersects with gender. Susan Barton’s struggle for authorship mirrors the historical exclusion of women from literary and public spheres. Like the colonized, women were often denied speech or credibility.
Coetzee draws subtle parallels between Susan and Friday: both are silenced by Foe, both are objects of his narrative control. Yet their silences differ in kind—Friday’s is historical and racial, Susan’s is gendered and social. Together, they expose the layered hierarchies of oppression within both colonial and patriarchal systems.
This double lens—postcolonial and feminist—reveals the novel’s complexity. Coetzee does not romanticize silence; he shows how it operates differently across axes of power. His sensitivity to these distinctions allows Foe to transcend simple binaries of oppressor and oppressed, instead portraying a web of relations in which everyone is implicated.
Reading Foe through Postcolonial Theory
Coetzee’s Foe can be understood as a dramatization of several key concepts in postcolonial theory:
- Edward Said’s Orientalism: Said argues that the West constructs the East as its inferior “Other” to justify domination. In Foe, Friday functions as the “Other” whom Susan and Foe attempt to define. Coetzee reveals how such representation reduces the colonized to stereotype.
- Spivak’s Subalternity: Spivak’s famous question—“Can the subaltern speak?”—finds its literary echo in Friday’s silence. Coetzee does not answer the question but stages it, allowing readers to experience its difficulty.
- Homi Bhabha’s Hybridity: Susan Barton’s ambiguous position between power and exclusion reflects Bhabha’s notion of hybridity—the space where identities overlap, and meanings shift. Coetzee uses this liminality to challenge fixed categories of colonizer and colonized.
By embodying theory within narrative, Coetzee transforms abstract concepts into lived experience. The novel becomes both a critique of imperial discourse and a meditation on the ethics of reading.
Coetzee’s Moral Vision
Beyond its theoretical sophistication, Foe is a profoundly moral work. Coetzee’s fiction consistently grapples with the responsibilities of the writer in a world of injustice. His refusal to speak for the subaltern reflects his belief in literature as a space of ethical encounter rather than moral instruction.
In Foe, this ethics takes the form of silence and uncertainty. Coetzee resists the temptation to resolve Friday’s story, to translate him into the language of empathy or justice. Instead, he invites readers to dwell in discomfort—to recognize that true listening requires surrendering authority.
This moral vision aligns with Coetzee’s broader oeuvre, including Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace, where he explores guilt, complicity, and the possibility of redemption. Foe stands out as his most self-reflexive work, examining the act of writing itself as a site of moral peril.
Conclusion
J. M. Coetzee’s Foe transforms the colonial adventure story into a postcolonial meditation on voice, silence, and authorship. By rewriting Robinson Crusoe, Coetzee exposes how the Western canon was built upon silenced others and invisible histories. Through Friday’s mute presence, Susan’s narrative struggle, and Foe’s manipulative authorship, the novel interrogates the very foundations of storytelling and moral authority.
Silence in Foe is not a void but a form of resistance, a reminder of what lies beyond speech. The subaltern’s inability to speak within colonial discourse becomes an ethical demand for new forms of listening. Coetzee’s achievement lies in showing that decolonization must occur not only in politics but also in language, imagination, and reading itself.
In an age when stories continue to shape our understanding of truth and identity, Foe teaches that every narrative carries moral weight. To write—or to read—responsibly means acknowledging the silences our words cannot fill. Coetzee thus gives us a novel that is not only a rewriting of Robinson Crusoe but a rewriting of literature’s own conscience.
Works Cited
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. Routledge, 1989.
Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Coetzee, J. M. Foe. Secker & Warburg, 1986.
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Penguin Classics, 1719.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Routledge, 1972.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Penguin, 1978.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Columbia University Press, 1994.
Head, Dominic. J. M. Coetzee. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. University of Chicago Press, 1978.
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. Routledge, 1998.
Parry, Benita. “Speech and Silence in the Fictions of J. M. Coetzee.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 23, no. 1, 1988, pp. 22–30.
Thormählen, Marianne. “The Silence of Friday: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and the Politics of Writing.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 38, no. 2, 1992, pp. 315–332.
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