Waiting For The Barbarians Critical Analysis

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians: Affirming alterities through the resolution of key conflicts and representation of power.
This essay offers an analysis of the concept of alterity or otherness through the representation of power and the resolution of key conflicts in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians. The essay first explores the representation of power in the novel as it relates to certain binaries such as ‘self’ and ‘other’; ‘just and ‘unjust’; and ‘powerful’ and ‘vulnerable’. Secondly, the novel’s resolution of key conflicts and how alterities are affirmed will be discussed.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines colonialism as an “alleged policy of exploitation of backward or weak peoples by a large power”. Waiting for the Barbarians is set in an unspecified place and time but serves as an as an allegory to imperial or colonial atrocities that were

As discussed earlier, his imprisonment served as a means of giving him a new identity and the Magistrate sees himself as a servant of justice. He feels that his imprisonment will be his payment for the injustice that has been done onto the barbarians. This alterity, however, does not justify the suffering that the so-called barbarians had to endure. It only points to a lost individual who cannot even begin to reconcile the realities the natives had to endure under the reign of the Empire. He is left “feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere” (Coetzee 1980:170). This relates to Coetzee’s visualisation of South African literature in terms of alterities, “that is, those that goes against the discourse of history” (Byrnes et al. 2015:22) since “a case can be made for identifying Coetzee in the tortured conscience of the Magistrate” (Poyner,