Table of Contents
Personal Information
Assignment Details
Abstract
Keywords
Introduction: Rewriting the Colonial Archive
The Unspeakable: Friday’s Silence as Archival Resistance
The Violence of Historical Erasure
Silence as Resistance and Unassimilability
The Unethical Impulses: Appropriation and Patriarchal Mediation
Postcolonial Feminism and Dual Marginalization
Foe:The Gatekeeper of Commercial Narrative
Ethical Storytelling: The Body and the Flow of Silence
The Undoing of Narrative: Descent into the Wreck
Witnessing the Unending Stream
Conclusion: Preserving the Silence
References
Personal Information:
Name:- Trupti Hadiya
Batch:- M.A. Sem 3 (2024-2026)
Enrollment Number:- 5108240013
E-mail Address:hadiyatrupti55@gmail.com
Roll Number:- 31
Assignment Details:-
Topic: Writing the Unspeakable: Silence, Slavery, and Ethical Storytelling in Coetzee’s Foe
Paper & subject code:- 20408 Paper 203: The Postcolonial Studies
Submitted to:- Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, MKBU, Bhavnagar
Date of Submission:- 10 November 2025
Abstract
J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) operates as a searing metafictional counter-narrative to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, fundamentally interrogating the ethics of colonial literary representation. This paper asserts that the novel’s central project is to define an ethical storytelling that refuses the colonial impulse to dominate and interpret. It achieves this by positioning Friday’s enforced silence as the unassimilable "unspeakable" at the core of the colonial narrative. Through the constant struggle for narrative control between the marginalized narrator, Susan Barton, and the author-figure, Daniel Foe, Coetzee demonstrates how colonial and patriarchal impulses coalesce to silence the slave subject. The novel’s ultimate triumph is its insistence that true postcolonial critique lies not in presumptuously "giving voice" to the subaltern, which constitutes another form of appropriation, but in ethically and visibly acknowledging the historical silence as an enduring testament to the violence of slavery and cultural erasure.
Keywords
Silence, Slavery, Ethical Storytelling, Metafiction, Postcolonial Critique, The Subaltern, Colonial Archive, Friday's Cut Tongue, Unspeakable.
About the Author
J.M. Coetzee is a highly influential South African novelist, essayist, and academic, celebrated globally as one of the most significant literary voices against colonialism and apartheid. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, his works—including Foe, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Disgrace—are characterized by a spare, austere prose and an uncompromising ethical examination of power, violence, and the possibility of moral action in compromised political environments. Coetzee frequently employs metafiction to deconstruct canonical Western texts (like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe) and interrogate the very nature of storytelling, focusing particularly on the political problem of representing the marginalized and giving voice to the historically silent or "unspeakable" subject, making him a crucial figure in contemporary postcolonial critique.
Nationality: South African.
Major Award: Nobel Prize in Literature (2003).
Key Themes: Apartheid, colonial guilt, ethics of representation, the politics of silence.
Style: Austere, intellectual, heavily reliant on metafiction and allegory.
Significance: Redefined postcolonial critique by focusing on the failure of language to contain historical trauma.
About the Novel
J.M. Coetzee's Foe (1986)
Foe is a metafictional postcolonial novel that rewrites Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The narrative centers on Susan Barton, who seeks to have her story of survival on an island with Cruso and the mute slave Friday written by the author Daniel Foe. Coetzee uses this premise to critique the ethics of representation, focusing on how power—both colonial and patriarchal—systematically silences the marginalized. The novel argues that the true "unspeakable" violence of history is embodied in Friday's literally severed tongue, which resists being translated or assimilated into the Western literary tradition.
Genre: Metafiction, Postcolonial Literature, Historical Revisionism.
Narrator: Primarily Susan Barton, an 18th-century woman seeking to control her own narrative.
Central Conflict: The struggle between Susan Barton's desire for factual truth and Daniel Foe's insistence on sensationalism (cannibals, gold) to make the story marketable.
Crucial Figure: Friday, the mute slave whose cut tongue symbolizes the historical erasure and unassimilable trauma of the slave trade.
Core Theme: The novel deconstructs the idea of "giving voice" to the subaltern, suggesting that an ethical approach must instead bear witness to the silence imposed by colonial violence.
Setting: Begins on an unnamed island, shifting to London, where the writing process itself becomes the main setting.
1. Introduction: Rewriting the Colonial Archive
J.M. Coetzee’s Foe is a self-reflexive critique that positions the problem of authorship at the heart of postcolonial studies. By placing Susan Barton in the familiar setting of Defoe’s island, Coetzee immediately opens the canon to new perspectives, yet his most radical intervention is the transformation of Friday into a mute slave with a severed tongue. This physical mutilation is more than a plot device; it is a literal inscription of historical violence and the profound silence of the colonized subject.
The novel’s metafictional framework is specifically designed to scrutinize the moral relationship between the writer and the written subject, questioning whether it is ever possible for the dominant culture to tell the story of the Other without enacting a further, symbolic colonization. Foe therefore moves beyond merely rewriting a historical novel; it defines the conditions under which an ethical, postcolonial narrative can even exist, asserting that the most truthful story of slavery is one that refuses to dissolve the traumatic silence of the past.
2. The Unspeakable: Friday’s Silence as Archival Resistance
Friday's character is the embodiment of historical trauma, and his muteness is the ideological wound of the novel. Coetzee transforms the figure from a docile pupil into the focal point of a crucial postcolonial anguish.
2.1. The Violence of Historical Erasure
Friday’s cut tongue functions as the ultimate metaphor for the violence of the colonial archive. The novel strongly implies that the ship from which Friday escaped was a slaver, meaning the unspeakable historical truth is the fate of the "hundreds of his fellow slaves" chained below the waves. The physical removal of Friday’s tongue was the slavers' method of ensuring that the true narrative of the Middle Passage—the atrocities of the trade—could never be articulated or entered into colonial history. Thus, the resulting silence is not an empty space but a powerful, permanent witness to historical injustice itself.
2.2. Silence as Resistance and Unassimilability
Friday’s silence is not simply a passive deficiency; it becomes a deliberate, active form of resistance. He refuses to communicate through Western symbolic systems, such as writing, only producing enigmatic, self-erasing circular scribbles. This deliberate lack of inscription signals that Friday's essence, his inner narrative, remains outside the reach of the colonizer's language. The silence, therefore, is his greatest defense, transforming his muteness into a profound act of self-possession.
The colonial impulse, as embodied by Susan and Foe, is to "solve" Friday's silence through interpretation and narration, a desire rooted in the need for narrative resolution and control. Yet, Friday’s unassimilable presence challenges this impulse, forcing the realization that the postcolonial urge to "recover" a voice risks enacting a second colonization by forcing the trauma of the past into a structure palatable to the West. The mute body insists on the complexity that defies simple narrative capture.
3. The Unethical Impulses: Appropriation and Patriarchal Mediation
The heart of Foe lies in the conflict between Susan Barton's desire for factual truth and Daniel Foe's commercial demands. This tension exposes the dual forces of colonialism and patriarchy that complicate and corrupt ethical authorship.
3.1. Postcolonial Feminism and Dual Marginalization
Susan Barton enters the narrative as a marginalized figure battling for authorship and authority against a prevailing patriarchal culture. The novel contains a strong postcolonial feminist thrust by linking Susan (as a woman) and Friday (as the slave/racial other), as both share the common fate of being "othered" and excluded from the male-dominated literary canon. Susan’s initial struggle is for "substance"—the voice and legitimacy that a patriarchal world denies her.
However, her marginalized status does not absolve her from ethical complicity. Despite her good intentions, her relationship with Friday quickly replicates the dynamics of power. Her earnest desire to tell his story is simultaneously an attempt to "colonize" it, asserting her authority over his traumatic experience. The novel thus issues a complex warning: even the well-intentioned white liberal artist can perpetuate the epistemological violence of presuming to speak for the subaltern.
3.2. Foe: The Gatekeeper of Commercial Narrative
Daniel Foe represents the commercial engine and ideological gatekeeper of the Western literary tradition. He is completely indifferent to Susan's factual, mundane account of the island, openly demanding dramatic additions like "cannibals, a lion, a lost treasure" to satisfy the public's thirst for the exotic and the sensational.
Foe's insistence on fabrication reveals that the colonial narrative impulse is inherently unethical. It prioritizes spectacle and marketability over historical veracity. The act of writing, as Foe practices it, becomes an act of disguise and distortion, profiting from the exploitation of the Other’s pain. Coetzee uses Foe to criticize the historical complicity of the adventure novel form in romanticizing and justifying colonial exploitation, leaving the writer with the arduous task of pursuing a difficult, possibly unpublishable truth.
4. Ethical Storytelling: The Body and the Flow of Silence
The novel’s final, abstract section moves beyond the failures of Susan and Foe to offer Coetzee's vision for an ethical mode of witnessing, found not in language, but in the body and in the flow of the unspeakable.
4.1. The Undoing of Narrative: Descent into the Wreck
The final, detached narrator descends into the dark waters to witness the sunken slave ship—the ultimate repressed site of the story. This submerged realm is defined as a space where language fails; "Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused." This powerful dissolution of discourse emphasizes that the historical truth of slavery is beyond linguistic capture and intellectual resolution. In this waterlogged space, "bodies are their own signs," forcing the reader to abandon the search for traditional narrative meaning and confront the physical, traumatic reality of the slave’s existence.
4.2. Witnessing the Unending Stream
The climax of ethical storytelling occurs when the narrator approaches Friday’s submerged body and opens his mouth, not to insert a recovered language, but to observe what emerges: a "slow stream, without breath, without interruption... Soft and cold, dark and unending."
This stream is identified as the truth of Friday—not a voice, but the unending flow of lost language, lost history, and unacknowledged trauma. Coetzee’s final, profound message is that the ethical postcolonial author’s duty is not to speak for the slave, but to bear witness to the silent, dark, and continuing reality of that which colonial violence rendered unspeakable. The novel thus concludes by refusing narrative closure, ensuring that Friday's historical absence remains an open, persistent, and ethically demanding question for the reader.
Conclusion
J. M. Coetzee’s Foe is a masterly interrogation of the literary mechanisms that perpetuate colonial power. By centering the novel on the unspeakable reality of Friday’s silence, Coetzee achieves an authentic postcolonial critique that implicates the conventions of novel writing, historical record, and patriarchal control. The novel demonstrates that the trauma of the slave trade cannot be resolved by the colonial language that imposed it. Instead, ethical storytelling demands a humble act of listening to the absence—a respectful and persistent preservation of silence as a monument to the victims whose stories, though lost to the colonial archive, define the very boundaries of moral representation.
Through Susan Barton’s struggle to articulate Friday’s story, Coetzee exposes the limitations of both Enlightenment rationality and Western narrative authority. The silence that haunts the text is not merely a lack of speech but a site of resistance, a refusal to be assimilated into the colonizer’s discourse. In this way, Foe transforms the act of storytelling into an ethical dilemma, urging readers to question the legitimacy of speaking for the other and to acknowledge the spaces where language itself fails.
References:
Bishop, G. Scott. “J. M. Coetzee’s Foe: A Culmination and a Solution to a Problem of White Identity.” World Literature Today, vol. 64, no. 1, 1990, pp. 54–57. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/40145792. Accessed 4 Nov. 2025.
Coetzee, J. M. Foe. Penguin UK, 2010. Accessed 4 November 2025.
Greenfield, Matthew. “Coetzee’s Foe and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: Confession, Authority, and Private Languages.” The Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 25, no. 3, 1995, pp. 223–37. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30225429. Accessed 4 Nov. 2025.
Moore, John Rees. “J. M. Coetzee and Foe.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 98, no. 1, 1990, pp. 152–59. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27546175. Accessed 4 Nov. 2025.
Neimneh, Shadi. “Postcolonial Feminism: Silence and Storytelling in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe.” ResearchGate, 2014, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263849320PostcolonialFeminismSilenceandStorytellinginJMCoetzee'sFoe. Accessed 27 Apr. 2024.
Peterson, Christopher. “The Home of Friday: Coetzee’s Foe.” Textual Practice, vol. 30, no. 5, Oct. 2015, pp. 857–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236x.2015.1084365.
Turk, Tisha. “Intertextuality and the Collaborative Construction of Narrative: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe.” Narrative, vol. 19, no. 3, 2011, pp. 295–310. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41289306. Accessed 4 Nov. 2025.
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