Waiting For The Barbarians Essay

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

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