ipl-logo

Waiting For The Barbarians Essay

762 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Waiting for the barbarians literary analysis

As a relational force, power constructs social organization and hierarchy by producing discourses and truths, by imposing discipline and order, and by shaping human desires and subjectivities. (Karlberg, 4) In Waiting for the Barbarians, the invention of barbarians helps to produce power that permeates everywhere in the novel. It constructs the truth which is imaginary and make use of its advantage to discipline in order to obtain colonial discourse. In the novel the nomads, whose stories are made ups by the Empire, have no right to justify themselves.The barbarians, from the beginning to the end, stayed in constant silence. They are no more than a bunch of characters shaped by the Empire. When the old man and his nephew went in town to seek for medical care, they were indiscriminately caught up and accused of “robbery”. The old man’s explanations were …show more content…

The magistrate was curious about how she got injured by the police. However, the girl never answered this question directly, by either saying “I’ am tired of taking ”(Coetzee, 44) or simply “shrugs and keep silent” (Coetzee, 31). The problem in their communication was caused by asymmetry of discourse, but not the language barrier. They could communicate properly in other situations, but only when she was asked to describe how the soldiers tortured her, she refused to speak. In this case, the magistrate, the represent of the colonizers of the Empire, deprived the barbarian girl of discourse to build up his colonial discourse, forming a strong contrasting relationship between the two characters--- the oppressor and the oppressed. In short, in the novel, the barbarians, from the beginning to the end, are the silent, voiceless objects. They never got a chance to express themselves; their images are made up the Empire; their fates are controlled by a man named Joll. It seems like the only thing would speak for them is their wounded

Show More
Related
571 Words | 3 Pages

Introduction Understanding the past through looking at the case study on the Entombed Warriors of Xian it is determined that the past is influential in modern day activities. The uncovering of one the major tourist attractions in china was by complete mistake. It was uncovered by a farmer who was building a well in 1974 and later oped as a tourist attraction in 1979. It’s known to be apart of the Qin Empire’s era and he was later buried there.

Read More
537 Words | 3 Pages

The total destruction of the city of Nishapur and its inhabitants shows that they had no mercy on those whom they killed and didn’t blink an eye at the idea of flattening a town so it no longer remained standing. An act to this magnitude shows how barbaric the barbarians actually were.

Read More
2020 Words | 9 Pages

This demonstrates how their power had no limits on how far they could go on treating someone badly, especially their slaves. They both take advantage of their power to get what they want, and to make someone’s life

Read More
458 Words | 2 Pages

we heard a howl of humiliation that echoes across two centuries of dispossession, injustice, suffering and survival,” alluding to the concept of community and

Read More
536 Words | 3 Pages

Americans have long been fascinated with the narrative genre. The idea that an innocent could be taken from the home into a wilderness or foreign land at a moment’s notice has ‘’captured’’ American’s imagination from the time of the early colonists who loved the narratives to the modern day movie goers who thrill in movies such as Taken. Two frequently read narratives from americans past, A narrative of the captivity of Mary Rowlandson and The interesting narrative of The life of Olaudah Equiano,focus on how their life was when they were captured. While these narratives differ on many fronts,there are also plenty of commalities. Mary is beside herself with grief (66).

Read More
1152 Words | 5 Pages

A majority women and children but they themselves saw them as the enemy, without no enemy there is no war. On page 267 the novel reads “He would call in artillery. He would fire up jungles. He would make the rivers burn”.

Read More
512 Words | 3 Pages

An individual 's responsibility towards the disenfranchised is to stop evil in the world. In the story ‘’ The Interlopers’’ the hatred between the two families causes conflict in the story, “The possibility of evil” Mrs Strangeworth was spreading rumours about people in the community by sending letters around and the boy that finds Miss Strangeworth 's letters and cuts up her rose garden and tells Miss Strangeworth that the community knows it 's her that 's sending the letters, In the short story ‘’The Doll 's House’’ the Kelveys were not allowed to be around the little girls anymore and the town shunned them. In these stories the main characters look like good people that are doing evil things. And in ‘’The Night’’ the selection In the story ‘’The Interlopers’’ the conflict is the hatred between the two families. Throughout the story the hatred brings the them together by them becoming friends because that meant they had a chance to live because their men would help both of them out from under the tree instead of ones men getting his leader out and killing the other.

Read More
1493 Words | 6 Pages

The aforementioned perspectives are explored through the limited omniscient third person narrator, who narrates in a factual tone and provides the lens from which events are viewed. Although the narrator is omniscient in the traditional sense, as he or she has access to the thoughts of all characters, the narrator is limited in that he or she solely follows Anton’s journey. Consequently, the events that transpired previous to and following the assault remain ambiguous and fluctuate as new information is introduced by supporting characters. Within the exposition, The Assault features Anton’s perspective on the events leading up to the incident.

Read More
943 Words | 4 Pages

Mark Miller Professor Karin Hooks Comp. ELA 162, 22, April 2023 A “True” War Story Tim O’Brien creates a feeling of confusion for his readers by creating fictional characters that do obscure things during the war. Rat Kiley shoots down a water buffalo for his kicks. “He stepped back and shot it through the knee, he put the muzzle up against his mouth and shot away. Nobody said much.

Read More
1150 Words | 5 Pages

In interrogation, Henry is treated with extreme racism and unfairly called an “animal,” setting the unjust reality that nothing Henry says or does will prevent him from being accused. During this scene, El Pachuco acts not only as a guide for Henry but can expression of his inner thoughts and a voice of sympathy, as he makes several remarks to Henry such as “Don’t tell ‘em shit,” and “Spit in his pinche face.” These remarks all lead to El Pachuco’s final remark, filled with the truth of the situation that “you don’t deserve it, ese, but you’re going to get it anyway,” (Valdez 32). In this scene, cultural oppression and the truth of silence is emphasized as Henry has no means of defending himself against the justice system that identified him as a criminal based on race. Even though Henry did not commit the crime and is innocent, his voice is completely lost to society and must manifest itself in the form of an inner-narrator, one who lets the readers and audience know of Henry’s forced audience to spark change in how minorities are treated.

Read More
279 Words | 2 Pages

Then, when the people who live in the native homeland now raise arms, the original enemy replays, such as a “second Hitler” or “another Achilles.” Vergil’s Aeneid

Read More
1532 Words | 7 Pages

In the play The Tempest by William Shakespeare, Prospero demonstrates the theme of divides of power by exhibiting dominance over Caliban. He does this by using his position, which he gained by using magic, and by framing Caliban as both a slave and a primitive uneducable savage. By analysing this divide of power, colonization becomes a common allegory throughout the text. Post-colonialism in literature relates directly to experience between the colonized and the colonizer. Shakespeare was never one of those colonizers but in his writing displays that he based many of his ideas for this play on stories from these travelers to foreign lands.

Read More
910 Words | 4 Pages

In “The Foreign Travels of Sir John Mandeville,” John Mandeville provides an account of his travels by creating an imaginative geography of the people and places he visits. Through this imaginative geography the idea of the Western “self” is explored by highlighting the differences between “self,” and the “other” – the peoples of civilizations Mandeville visits. It is in this way that the Western identity is formed – it is not concerned with what Western civilization is but more, what it is not. This dichotomy between self and other is explored in Mandeville’s writing in several capacities, specifically: the civilized human and the savage animals, the pious Christians and the uncivilized pagans, and the good and the evil.

Read More
479 Words | 2 Pages

This silent voice “stands opposite the blackness and yet it does not oppose the blackness, for conflict is not part of its nature” (473). Consequently, the silent voice allows the narrator’s consciousness to realize that she does not have to choose between cultures, but can be a mix of both. Through this silent voice, the narrator rids her consciousness of despair and hatred and moves forward solely in love.

Read More
1953 Words | 8 Pages

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,

Read More

More about Waiting For The Barbarians Essay

Related Topics

Open Document