Assignment 203
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Silence as Resistance: Power, Voice, and Authorship in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe
Roll Number: 19
Paper & Subject Code: Paper 203 – The Postcolonial Studies
Abstract
J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) reimagines Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe from the margins, interrogating how colonial history, language, and authorship intertwine to silence the oppressed. Through the displaced narrator Susan Barton and the tongueless African slave Friday, Coetzee dismantles the authority of the colonial archive and exposes the violence implicit in the act of narration itself. Friday’s silence, far from mere absence, emerges as a site of resistance—an unassimilable void that frustrates colonial and even postcolonial attempts to “speak for” the subaltern. This paper explores how Foe transforms the Crusoe myth into a profound meditation on power, authorship, and the ethics of representation in postcolonial discourse.
1. Introduction: Writing from the Margins
J. M. Coetzee’s Foe emerges as a radical rewriting of the Enlightenment myth of mastery embodied in Robinson Crusoe (1719). Where Defoe’s novel celebrates the resourceful European individual taming nature and asserting control, Coetzee’s revision inverts that perspective. By centering Susan Barton, a castaway woman, and Friday, a mutilated African slave, Foe dismantles the assumptions of European rationality, authorship, and domination that undergird the original text.
The novel is framed as Susan’s account of her time on Cruso’s island and her later attempt to have that story recorded by the writer Daniel Foe (a fictionalized Defoe). Yet Susan’s voice is never fully heard—interrupted by editorial mediation, gendered silencing, and the haunting silence of Friday, whose tongue has been cut out. In this multi-layered narrative, Coetzee dramatizes what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls “the subaltern’s inability to speak”, not as biological muteness but as an epistemic condition imposed by colonial discourse.
Through its complex structure, Foe becomes a postcolonial allegory of storytelling itself, raising crucial questions:
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Who possesses the right to tell history?
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Can the colonizer’s language ever articulate the colonized experience?
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And, most provocatively, can silence itself become a mode of resistance?
2. Deconstructing Crusoe: Authority, Authorship, and the Colonial Archive
In Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, authorship mirrors colonial control. Crusoe writes his island into existence, naming, ordering, and claiming it through his language—an act that parallels the mapping and owning of colonial lands. As Edward Said notes in Culture and Imperialism, Crusoe’s island represents “the prototype of the colonial space, a blank page awaiting inscription by the European hand.”
Coetzee subverts this logic. His Cruso is stripped of grandeur: aged, weary, and purposeless. His island bears no marks of progress or mastery; he builds no grand civilization, only futile terraces that wash away with the rain. This Cruso neither writes nor imagines writing—his life remains unwritten and unrecorded. By removing the heroic authorial impulse, Coetzee exposes the fragility of colonial authority, revealing that its power rests not on moral or spiritual superiority but merely on control of narrative.
When Cruso dies at sea, Susan Barton attempts to narrate their experience, taking on the role of storyteller. Yet she soon discovers that storytelling itself is a contested terrain. Her manuscript, meant to reclaim her lived truth, is re-authored by Daniel Foe, who reshapes it into a marketable adventure. “You are the author of Crusoe’s story, not I,” she protests, but Foe’s control over publication ensures that her words are rewritten through the filter of male and colonial authority.
Coetzee thereby mirrors the colonial process of textual appropriation: just as the empire claimed lands and bodies, so too does it claim stories. The author, the historian, and the colonizer occupy similar positions of power—each defining what counts as truth and who gets remembered. In rewriting Defoe’s foundational myth, Coetzee thus deconstructs the author figure itself, showing how writing can become an act of domination even when it claims to recover lost voices.
3. Friday’s Silence: Violence, Erasure, and the Politics of Voice
Friday stands at the novel’s moral and philosophical core. Tongueless, enslaved, and unreadable, he embodies both the extremity of colonial violence and the possibility of radical resistance. His silence is not mere absence—it is a form of presence that unsettles every attempt to contain him within Western categories of meaning.
Coetzee’s narrative continually stages failed efforts to interpret Friday. Susan imagines that “his tongue was cut out by slavers,” while Foe speculates that “perhaps Cruso himself took it.” Yet the novel withholds confirmation, leaving the truth suspended in ambiguity. This unknowability becomes central: Friday’s mutilation signifies the epistemic violence of colonialism, which not only enslaves bodies but silences histories.
However, Coetzee resists turning Friday into a passive victim. His silence functions as a counter-speech, a refusal to participate in the language of the oppressor. Each time Susan or Foe attempts to “give Friday a voice,” they inadvertently reproduce the colonial gesture of ventriloquizing the subaltern. Spivak’s warning in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” resonates here: when the colonizer or liberal intellectual “speaks for” the subaltern, the latter’s difference is overwritten by dominant discourse.
In this sense, Friday’s muteness becomes a form of resistance—a silence that cannot be appropriated. His very unintelligibility challenges the power structures that depend on translation, naming, and representation. The final, haunting image of the novel—where a narrator descends into the wreck and listens to the “slow stream of bubbles rising from Friday’s mouth”—suggests that beneath silence lies another language altogether, one beyond colonial comprehension.
Thus, Coetzee transforms silence from a symbol of absence into an act of defiance: a rejection of the epistemic violence of being made to “speak” in the colonizer’s tongue.
4. Metafiction and the Instability of Truth
Foe is profoundly self-reflexive. Its layered narration—Susan’s letters, her dialogues with Foe, the ambiguous final perspective—forces readers to question the status of any version of the story. Coetzee draws attention to the constructedness of narrative, echoing postmodern concerns about language and representation.
The novel opens with a seemingly straightforward tale of survival but quickly collapses into textual uncertainty. Susan’s letters to Foe, which constitute much of the text, are themselves fictions within fiction—drafts, rewritings, appeals for authorship. Foe’s revisions of her account mirror the editorial manipulations that shape colonial historiography. The boundary between author and narrator blurs; so does the line between fact and fiction.
Coetzee uses this metafictional framework to question the notion of historical truth. Just as Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children undermines the authority of national history through narrative multiplicity, Coetzee dismantles the singular, linear narrative of colonial progress. By fragmenting perspective and refusing closure, he asserts that truth is always mediated—constructed through power and language.
This self-conscious narrative strategy also aligns Foe with the broader postmodern-postcolonial intersection that Rachid Karmim (2021) terms “a textual space where history and fiction dissolve into each other.” Coetzee uses postmodern techniques not for mere playfulness but as a political act—to expose how the colonial archive operates as fiction masquerading as truth.
5. The Ethics of Representation: Speaking For and Speaking Over
The heart of Foe lies in its ethical tension: should the writer attempt to recover the silenced voice of the subaltern, or should silence be preserved as a boundary that cannot be crossed? Susan Barton’s efforts to “give Friday a history” stem from compassion but reveal the arrogance of assuming interpretive control. She wishes to make Friday “known,” to fill the void of his silence with words—but each attempt betrays an inability to accept unknowability.
Daniel Foe, by contrast, is motivated not by empathy but by market logic. For him, Friday’s silence is a problem to be solved, a gap to be filled for narrative completeness. His fictionalization of Susan’s story mirrors the exploitative tendencies of colonial representation, where the colonized subject becomes raw material for European creativity.
Coetzee uses these contrasting approaches to dramatize the limits of narrative ethics. Both Susan and Foe believe they can redeem Friday through language; both fail. Friday’s silence ultimately resists translation, suggesting that some histories cannot and should not be spoken by others.
In this refusal, Coetzee also critiques well-meaning postcolonial recovery projects that seek to “give voice to the voiceless.” As Spivak and Trinh T. Minh-ha remind us, the act of recovery often replicates the very structures it opposes. Coetzee’s narrative ethics thus call for humility before silence—an acknowledgment that not every trauma can be narrated within the frameworks of Western discourse.
Friday’s silence is not a gap to be filled but a mirror held up to the limits of language. In his voicelessness lies the potential for a new kind of resistance—one that exposes the violence of representation itself.
6. Gender and the Politics of Narrative Control
While much attention centers on colonial silencing, Foe also foregrounds gendered silencing. Susan Barton’s struggle to be heard parallels the marginalization of women’s voices in patriarchal literary traditions. Her position as both narrator and subject exposes the precarious status of female authorship in the eighteenth-century literary world.
Foe’s editorial dominance over her story replicates the dynamics of male authorship suppressing female experience. Even when Susan controls the narrative, her words are mediated by a man who decides how—and whether—they reach the world. Coetzee thereby aligns the feminist struggle for voice with the postcolonial struggle for self-representation.
Susan’s predicament dramatizes what Hélène Cixous calls the need for écriture féminine—a writing that breaks from patriarchal forms. Yet Susan cannot achieve such liberation; she remains caught in a system where her language is defined by the male author’s authority. Her partial authorship, constantly revised and overwritten, underscores the novel’s broader theme: that the right to narrate is itself a site of power, contested along both gendered and colonial lines.
7. Silence, Language, and the Ethics of Listening
Coetzee’s Foe invites not only interpretation but also listening—a slow, ethical attention to what cannot be fully understood. The final section of the novel, where a nameless narrator descends into the shipwreck and encounters Friday’s body, evokes a dreamlike, almost mystical encounter with silence. The “stream of bubbles” emerging from Friday’s mouth is an image of submerged speech: language reduced to rhythm, breath, and sound.
This moment gestures toward a non-linguistic mode of communication, beyond the violence of naming. It suggests that silence need not be negation; it can be an alternative epistemology, a different way of being in the world. Coetzee thus redefines resistance not as articulation but as opacity, echoing Édouard Glissant’s call for “the right to opacity” in postcolonial thought—the right not to be fully known or explained.
In this light, Friday’s silence becomes an ethical demand directed at both the narrator and the reader: to resist mastery, to dwell in unknowing, to accept that understanding has limits. Coetzee turns reading itself into a moral act—an encounter with otherness that must not be domesticated by interpretation.
8. Conclusion: Reclaiming the Unspeakable
Foe is not simply a rewriting of Robinson Crusoe; it is a profound deconstruction of the colonial logic of storytelling. By denying closure, destabilizing narrative authority, and foregrounding the unspeakable, Coetzee exposes the deep wounds of history that cannot be healed through representation.
Through Susan Barton, he explores the gendered struggle for authorship; through Friday, the racialized silence of the subaltern; through Foe, the institutional machinery that transforms lived experience into profitable myth. Yet rather than offering solutions, Coetzee leaves us with an unsettling question: can literature ever escape complicity with the systems of power it seeks to critique?
In transforming silence into resistance, Coetzee redefines authorship as an ethical practice rooted in humility, not mastery. Foe demands that we recognize the limits of our interpretive reach and honor the silences that history has produced—not as absences to be filled, but as presences that call for listening.
Thus, silence in Foe becomes both a wound and a weapon—the trace of violence and the refusal to let that violence define identity. In giving us a story that cannot be fully told, Coetzee compels us to confront the boundaries of language, power, and empathy—and to hear, within the silence, the echo of all that history has sought to erase.
References
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Coetzee, J. M. Foe. Penguin Books, 1986.
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Rickel, Jennifer. “Speaking of Human Rights: Narrative Voice and the Paradox of the Unspeakable in J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Foe’ and ‘Disgrace.’” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 43, no. 2, 2013, pp. 160–85. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24484801. Accessed 30 Oct. 2025.
- Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1993.
- Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Nelson and Grossberg, Macmillan, 1988.
Suciu, Andreia Irina, and Mihaela Culea. “From Defoe to Coetzee’s Foe/Foe through Authorship.” Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture, vol. 11, 2021, pp. 121–137. University of Latvia, https://doi.org/10.22364/BJELLC.11.2021.08
“Unraveling the Quest for Identity in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe.” Migration Letters, 2024.
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