From Mastery to Muted Voices: A Critical Dialogue Between Robinson Crusoe and Foe

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Rewriting the Island: A Comparative and Critical Analysis of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe :

Table of Contents

Introduction

Historical and Literary Context

Narrative Authority and the Power to Tell

Crusoe and Cruso: Colonial Mastery Deconstructed

Friday: Silence, Slavery, and the Subaltern

Susan Barton and Feminist Reclamation

Intertextuality, Language, and Postcolonial Revision

Comparative Overview

Conclusion

Introduction:

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) stand in a remarkable intertextual conversation across centuries—one emerging from the dawn of British colonial modernity, the other confronting its haunting aftermath. Defoe’s novel, often claimed as the first English novel, enshrines the values of individualism, rationalism, and imperial faith through its hero’s conquest over isolation and nature. Crusoe’s island serves as an allegory for the European colonial mission—a stage upon which mastery, productivity, and divine providence perform the drama of empire. Centuries later, Coetzee revisits the same island to interrogate those myths. Foe is not a retelling but a radical rewriting, exposing the ideological silences in Defoe’s narrative—those of gender, race, and authorship. Through Susan Barton’s struggle for narrative agency and Friday’s mute resistance, Coetzee transforms Defoe’s tale of mastery into a meditation on silence, authorship, and postcolonial ethics.

Historical and Literary Context:

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe reflects the Enlightenment’s confidence in human reason and divine order, intertwining religion, labor, and colonial ideology. Crusoe becomes both a self‑made man and a microcosmic empire, constructing his world through faith and discipline. Coetzee’s Foe, written amid South Africa’s apartheid regime, emerges from a world where power and voice are themselves contested. The rewriting transforms Defoe’s colonial optimism into a sceptical reflection on language’s authority—highlighting how stories themselves participate in domination and erasure.

Narrative Authority and the Power to Tell:

Defoe’s first‑person realism gives Crusoe unchallenged narrative control: his voice structures both experience and meaning. The story’s apparent authenticity naturalizes Western truth‑telling as civilization’s hallmark. Coetzee undoes this claim through metafiction. The narrative of Foe unfolds through Susan Barton’s letters to the author Foe, revealing multiple mediations and gaps. The text constantly questions who owns a story—the survivor who lives it or the writer who tells it. The fragmented narration destabilizes authority, turning storytelling into a struggle for presence between male authorship, female experience, and subaltern silence.

Crusoe and Cruso: Colonial Mastery Deconstructed:

Defoe’s Crusoe is industrious, rational, and guided by divine assurance—his triumph over isolation mirrors Britain’s imperial spirit. In Foe, Cruso is weary, detached, and unproductive; his terraces, built on barren ground, parody Crusoe’s creative labor. This inversion transforms the island from a site of control to one of futility and erasure. Coetzee’s Cruso stands not as a colonial emblem but as its aftermath—a broken remnant of empire that has lost not just its zeal but its language of justification.

Friday: Silence, Slavery, and the Subaltern:

Among the most profound transformations is Coetzee’s reimagining of Friday. In Robinson Crusoe, Friday’s learning of English signifies his subjugation and “civilization.” In Foe, Friday’s silence—his tongue cut out before the story begins—becomes the very center of the novel’s ethical tension. His inarticulateness resists the colonizer’s desire for speech, standing as an emblem of histories annihilated by colonial violence. While Barton and Foe attempt to ascribe meaning to him, Friday’s silence endures, representing what Gayatri Spivak famously called “the subaltern who cannot speak.” His wordlessness demands recognition beyond words—a memorial for voices history has rendered unhearable.

Susan Barton and Feminist Reclamation:

Coetzee reintroduces the woman the 18th‑century adventure excluded. Susan Barton, the new protagonist, rewrites Defoe’s masculine myth from the margins. A shipwreck survivor, she is both character and storyteller, seeking validation in a patriarchal literary order. Her relationship with Foe dramatizes the dynamics of gendered authorship—her experience edited, reframed, and nearly erased by a male writer. Barton’s insistence on “telling her story” becomes a feminist act of resistance, challenging the literary structures that silence female experience.

Through Barton, Coetzee aligns postcolonial and feminist concerns: both call attention to exclusion by questioning who gets to define “truth.” Her voice contrasts with Friday’s silence, embodying another kind of marginalization—the one that seeks speech yet finds it always mediated by authority.

Intertextuality, Language, and Postcolonial Revision:

Foe functions as an intertextual palimpsest—layering Defoe’s colonial narrative with a postmodern, postcolonial critique. Coetzee’s rewriting is not imitation but conversation. It exposes that any story of civilization carries within it an opposite history of repression. The metafictional correspondence between Barton and Foe mirrors the relationship between colonized nations and their imperial narrators. Both struggle for self‑representation within inherited frameworks of language and power. Through self‑reflexive storytelling, Coetzee collapses the boundaries between fiction and history, imagination and ideology.

Comparative Overview

Aspect	Robinson Crusoe(Defoe)	Foe(Coetzee)
Historical Context	Enlightenment & colonial expansion	Apartheid South Africa & postmodern critique
Narrative Voice	First‑person realism asserting mastery	Fragmented metafiction exposing control
Colonial Ideology	Crusoe as civilizer and ruler	Cruso as passive anti‑hero; deconstructs empire
Treatment of Friday	Educated and subordinated	Mute, resistant, unreadable
Female Presence	Absent or marginal	Centralized through Susan Barton
Core Vision	Conquest, industry, divine providence	Silence, absence, ethical questioning

Conclusion:

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Coetzee’s Foe are not just two versions of a castaway tale—they represent two eras of moral imagination. Defoe’s novel celebrates the birth of modern individualism through mastery and colonization. Coetzee’s response dismantles that myth, exposing how the Western narrative of progress rests on silenced others. Through Susan Barton’s unfulfilled authorship and Friday’s irreversible silence, Foe confronts the ethical impossibility of giving voice to the subaltern. Coetzee thus transforms Defoe’s island into a symbol of narrative conscience, reminding readers that every civilization’s story is haunted by the untold stories it suppresses. His rewriting is both tribute and indictment—a postcolonial, feminist re‑imagining that compels literature to reckon with its own complicity in power and silence.

References :

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Edited by Michael Shinagel, W. W. Norton & Company, 1994.

Coetzee, J. M. Foe. Penguin Books, 1987.

Flair, Diana. “A Comparative Characterology of J.M. Coetzee’s Foe as an Appropriation of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.” Subalternspeak: Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2015, pp. 87–98, https://interactionsforum.com/images/pdfs/subalternspeak/v4/issue1/Flair-D.pdf.

Bhandari, Varsha. “Evolution in Narrative Technique through J. M. Coetzee’s Foe.” International Journal of English Language, Literature and Humanities, vol. 5, no. 2, 2018, pp. 115–118. http://www.ijelr.in/5.2.18/115-118%20VARSHA%20BHANDARI.pdf.

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