Foe by J M Coetzee

 This blog is written as a task assigned by Megha Trivedi ma'am.

Comparative and critical analysis of Daniel Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Foe’. 

I. Introduction

1. Defoe and the Birth of the English Novel

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) is often considered the first English novel and a foundation stone of modern prose fiction. It emerged during the Age of Enlightenment, a period that celebrated human reason, progress, and the expanding horizons of European exploration. Crusoe’s solitary survival on a deserted island is more than an adventure  it reflects the rational, self-reliant individualism that defined the 18th century. The novel aligns with the rise of Protestant ethics and bourgeois capitalism, portraying the human being as industrious, disciplined, and master of his environment. In this sense, Defoe constructs not only a fictional island but also a model of the modern Western subject autonomous, rational, and capable of imposing order upon chaos.

2. Colonial Ideology and the “Civilizing Mission”

Beneath its surface narrative of survival, Robinson Crusoe functions as an ideological document of empire. Crusoe’s act of taming the island and subordinating Friday the “native” he rescues mirrors the European colonial project of conquest and domination. The island becomes a microcosm of empire, with Crusoe as ruler and Friday as the colonized subject. This relationship naturalizes hierarchy: Crusoe’s authority is unquestioned, his mastery presented as both moral and divine. Defoe’s language of providence and divine favor legitimizes colonial expansion by linking it to Christian duty. Thus, Robinson Crusoe reflects and reinforces Eurocentric values, transforming colonial exploitation into a tale of human virtue and divine reward.

3. The Colonial “Other” and the Politics of Silence

Friday’s representation in Defoe’s novel reveals the racial and cultural assumptions of its time. He is voiceless, submissive, and defined entirely through Crusoe’s perception. His limited speech  reduced to “Yes, Master” symbolizes the denial of agency and identity to the colonized. Defoe’s narrative thus transforms the non-European subject into an object of European interpretation. This suppression of the Other’s voice becomes a central point of revision for later writers like Coetzee, who expose the ethical and political implications of such narrative silence.

4. J. M. Coetzee and the Rewriting of Empire

Over two and a half centuries later, J. M. Coetzee, the South African novelist and Nobel laureate, reimagined this foundational text in his 1986 novel Foe. Writing during apartheid a period of racial segregation and silencing in South Africa Coetzee reopens Defoe’s narrative from a postcolonial and postmodern perspective. His Foe is not merely a retelling but a radical rewriting that interrogates the ideological foundations of Defoe’s text. The title itself, “Foe,” refers both to the historical Defoe and to the notion of opposition suggesting that Coetzee’s novel positions itself as a counter-narrative to the colonial myth of Crusoe.

5. Transformation of Narrative Voice and Perspective

In Coetzee’s Foe, the story is no longer told by Crusoe, the master of the island, but by Susan Barton, a female castaway who becomes the new protagonist. Her presence introduces a feminist dimension to the narrative a perspective absent in Defoe’s world. The African character Friday reappears, but this time he is tongueless, having been mutilated by slavers. His silence becomes a powerful metaphor for the erasure of colonial subjects from history and literature. Coetzee thus transforms Defoe’s confident tale of survival and mastery into a meditation on loss, absence, and the ethics of storytelling.

6. Metafiction and the Question of Authorship

Coetzee frames Foe as a story about storytelling itself. Susan Barton narrates her experience to “Foe” a fictionalized version of Daniel Defoe who then reshapes her testimony into a marketable adventure story. This metafictional layer exposes the power dynamics behind authorship: how writers edit, distort, and appropriate real voices to fit dominant ideologies. Coetzee thereby parallels literary authorship with colonial authorship both acts of transforming lived realities into controlled narratives. The process of writing becomes an ethical question: who owns a story, and who gets to be heard?

7. Postcolonial and Feminist Reversal

Through Susan Barton, Coetzee introduces the marginalized perspective of a woman in a narrative tradition dominated by men. Her struggle to have her version of the story acknowledged reflects the broader feminist concern with voice, agency, and authorship. Meanwhile, Friday’s silence dramatizes the limits of representation an acknowledgment that some histories cannot be told within the language of the colonizer. This dual marginality of the woman and the colonized man  challenges both Defoe’s patriarchal and colonial assumptions.

8. Silence as a Political and Ethical Space

Friday’s missing tongue becomes one of the most powerful symbols in postcolonial literature. His silence is not mere absence but a presence of resistance. It embodies Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous question, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” suggesting that the subaltern can only “speak” through silence when dominant discourse refuses to listen. Coetzee deliberately refrains from “restoring” Friday’s voice because doing so would repeat the colonial act of ventriloquizing the Other. Instead, Foe confronts readers with the ethical demand to listen to silence to acknowledge what cannot be represented within Western frameworks.

9. From Realism to Postmodern Fragmentation

While Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe follows a linear, realistic narrative, emphasizing control, progress, and moral clarity, Coetzee’s Foe adopts fragmentation, uncertainty, and metafiction to question those very assumptions. Defoe’s world is structured by divine providence and human reason; Coetzee’s world is fragmented, self-reflexive, and open-ended. This shift from Enlightenment realism to postmodern ambiguity mirrors the broader historical movement from colonial confidence to postcolonial doubt.

10. Literature as Ethical Revision

By rewriting Defoe’s story, Coetzee transforms literature into a site of moral and historical re-examination. His Foe does not merely correct the past but asks readers to confront their complicity in systems of domination that persist through language and culture. The act of rewriting becomes a political gesture  reclaiming silenced histories and exposing how storytelling itself can be a form of oppression or liberation.

11. Comparative Framework: Intertextuality and Resistance

This comparative analysis situates Robinson Crusoe and Foe within a dialogue across time, ideology, and form:

• Defoe’s text constructs the imperial subject; Coetzee’s deconstructs it.

• Crusoe speaks to order and faith; Friday speaks through silence and loss.

• Defoe’s narrative is one of creation; Coetzee’s is one of critique.
  This intertextual relationship illustrates how postcolonial literature “writes back” to the empire, using the tools of fiction to expose the silences embedded in the canon.

12. Thesis Statement

Through Foe, Coetzee revisits and rewrites Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to expose the silences and power structures inherent in colonial discourse. By transforming the narrative of survival into a meditation on marginality, authorship, and the politics of voice, Coetzee redefines storytelling itself as an ethical act  one that listens to the unspeakable and gives space to the forgotten.

 

IV. Themes and Ideological Contrasts

1. Colonialism and Imperial Ideology

Major Point 1: Crusoe’s Island as an Empire of the Self

• Description: In Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the island becomes a symbol of European imperial ambition. Crusoe asserts absolute ownership over the land, names every space, and imposes order through labor and reason. His survival narrative transforms into an allegory of colonial conquest where the island mirrors Britain’s expansionist ideology.

• Crusoe embodies the Enlightenment ideal: rational, industrious, and self-reliant a man who “rules” nature and natives alike.

 2: Naturalization of European Dominance

• Description: Defoe presents Crusoe’s dominance as morally justified and civilizationally superior. Friday’s servitude is depicted as “natural” and even benevolent, reinforcing racial hierarchy. Crusoe’s “civilizing mission” reflects the early capitalist and imperial mindset that valorized mastery over the Other.

 3: Coetzee’s Deconstruction of Empire

• Description: Coetzee’s Foe subverts this narrative. The island, once a site of power, becomes a barren, ambiguous space where meaning disintegrates. Cruso (without the ‘e’) is no longer a heroic colonizer but an exhausted man, stripped of divine purpose and authority. The act of colonization is recast as absurd and futile.

4: Friday’s Tongue as Colonial Symbol

• Description: Friday’s missing tongue is the most powerful image of Foe. It represents the silenced histories of colonized people whose voices were erased by empire. Coetzee turns the colonial encounter into a meditation on loss, trauma, and untranslatability — a silence that resists narrative possession.

 5: Postcolonial Reversal

• Description: While Robinson Crusoe celebrates European mastery, Foe destabilizes it. The island no longer symbolizes possession but alienation. The colonizer’s voice is displaced, and the silenced subject (Friday) becomes central through his very muteness. Coetzee rewrites colonial order into postcolonial uncertainty.

2. Voice and Silence

1: Language as Control in Defoe

• Description: Crusoe’s authority stems from his command of language and writing. His journals, inventories, and reflections shape reality what he writes becomes truth. Friday’s speech, limited to “Yes, Master,” reinforces the colonizer’s linguistic monopoly.

2: The Silence of the Other

• Description: Friday’s limited expression in Robinson Crusoe mirrors how colonial discourse denies subjectivity to the Other. His identity is reduced to what Crusoe records. Speech becomes an instrument of control  to name is to dominate.

 3: Coetzee’s Ethics of Silence

• Description: In Foe, silence is no longer emptiness but resistance. Friday’s tonguelessness prevents his story from being appropriated. His muteness becomes a metaphor for historical trauma  what Gayatri Spivak calls “the subaltern who cannot speak.”

4: Susan Barton’s Frustration

• Description: Susan tries to make Friday “speak,” but fails. Her struggle symbolizes the impossibility of fully representing the Other within Western language. Every attempt to translate Friday’s silence only re-imposes colonial discourse.

5: The Submerged Voice

• Description: The novel ends with an image of drowning and muffled sound  an underwater voice that can be heard but not understood. Coetzee leaves the story unresolved, suggesting that history’s true voices remain submerged, unreachable, yet ethically present.

3. Gender and Authorship

 1: Patriarchal Foundations of Defoe’s Text

• Description: Robinson Crusoe is a distinctly masculine narrative centered on survival, rationality, and conquest. Women are marginal or absent, reflecting patriarchal values of the 18th century where the “self-made man” defined human achievement.

t 2: Feminine Reinscription in Coetzee’s Foe

• Description: Coetzee introduces Susan Barton, a woman narrator who replaces Crusoe as the central voice. Her attempt to tell her story challenges the male-centered tradition of exploration and authorship.

 3: Struggle for Narrative Authority

• Description: Susan’s encounter with the writer “Foe” dramatizes the gendered struggle for narrative control. Foe rewrites Susan’s account to fit colonial adventure conventions, denying her authorship. This mirrors how male writers historically edited and appropriated female experiences.

 4: Feminist Dimension of Authorship

• Description: Through Susan, Coetzee questions who has the right to tell the story and whose voice is considered legitimate. Her resistance to Foe’s manipulation reveals a feminist critique of literary history and male textual authority.

 5: Intersections of Gender and Empire

• Description: Coetzee links gendered oppression to colonial domination. Both women and colonized subjects are silenced, rewritten, or objectified within patriarchal discourse. Susan’s struggle to “speak” parallels Friday’s voicelessness.

4. Authorship and Power

 1: Crusoe as the Author of His World

• Description: In Robinson Crusoe, authorship symbolizes mastery. Crusoe’s journals not only document events but construct them  he is both actor and author. Writing becomes a form of control that parallels imperial conquest.

 2: Metafictional Self-Awareness in Foe

• Description: Coetzee turns authorship into a problem. The writer “Foe” manipulates Susan’s story to suit literary and commercial expectations. The act of storytelling becomes an act of dominance, exposing how narratives are shaped by power.

 3: Storytelling as Colonization

• Description: Coetzee parallels the author’s power over characters with the colonizer’s power over subjects. Both involve silencing, rewriting, and control. Writing becomes another form of imperialism  one that conquers not land, but experience.

4: The Ethics of Narrative

• Description: Coetzee redefines authorship as an ethical act, not a creative one. The writer must recognize what cannot be spoken  the silenced, the erased, the forgotten. Friday’s muteness becomes the moral center of Foe, reminding readers that not all stories can be owned.

5: Intertextual Self-Reflexivity

• Description: By rewriting Robinson Crusoe within Foe, Coetzee performs what Linda Hutcheon calls “historiographic metafiction” a self-conscious rewriting of history through literature. Authorship becomes an act of questioning, not mastery.

5. Religion, Morality, and Humanism

 1: Christian Morality in Defoe’s Narrative

• Description: Robinson Crusoe is steeped in Christian ethics. Crusoe’s repentance and conversion symbolize divine grace. The novel reflects the Protestant work ethic: labor, faith, and obedience as paths to salvation.

2: Moral Certainty and Colonial Justification

• Description: Defoe links morality with mastery  Crusoe’s dominance over Friday and the island is seen as divinely ordained. Religion justifies colonization as a mission to “civilize” others under God’s will.

 3: Coetzee’s Ethical Ambiguity

• Description: In Foe, divine order is absent. Cruso’s labor has no transcendence; his survival is meaningless. The novel replaces moral certainty with existential doubt, reflecting the postmodern condition of moral fragmentation.

4: Fragmented Humanism

• Description: Coetzee portrays a broken, postcolonial humanism  Susan is lost between agency and powerlessness, Friday embodies historical trauma, and Foe represents the exploitative intellect. There is no redemption, only ethical confrontation.

 5: Ethics of Listening and Responsibility

• Description: Coetzee concludes that true humanism lies not in mastery but in attentiveness. To “hear” Friday’s silence  without appropriating it  becomes the ultimate moral act. This transforms religion into an ethics of responsibility toward the Other.

III. Narrative Structure and Form 

A. Defoe’s Realism and Linear Narrative

Major Point 1: First-Person Realism and Illusion of Authenticity

• Description: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is often considered one of the earliest examples of the realist novel in English literature. The first-person journal-like narration gives readers the impression of an authentic personal document rather than a fictional creation.

• Crusoe records his daily struggles, fears, and moral reflections with meticulous detail  lists of provisions, calculations, and observations  which imitate empirical realism.

• This narrative style constructs a believable “I” at the center of the text, reinforcing Enlightenment ideals of rational subjectivity and self-awareness.

 2: Narrative Order as Symbol of Rational Control

• Description: The structure of Crusoe’s narrative  linear, orderly, and chronological  mirrors his attempt to impose rational control on the chaos of nature and isolation.

• The act of writing itself becomes a means of survival and mastery: through narration, Crusoe organizes not only his environment but also his mind.

• This ordered storytelling reflects the European colonial mindset: to write is to govern, to name is to own.

3: Linear Progress and Enlightenment Teleology

• Description: Robinson Crusoe follows a clear trajectory of progress: from shipwreck to civilization, from sin to redemption.

• The narrative assumes that time moves forward in a linear, developmental fashion  paralleling 18th-century European notions of historical “progress” and human improvement.

• This linearity mirrors the ideology of empire, which viewed colonization as a natural extension of civilization’s forward march.

4: Realism as Ideological Tool

• Description: Defoe’s use of detailed realism is not neutral it reinforces colonial and capitalist ideologies by presenting Crusoe’s mastery as natural, reasonable, and divinely sanctioned.

• The reader is invited to accept Crusoe’s worldview as objective truth, thereby legitimizing his possession of the island and his control over Friday.

• Realism, in this sense, becomes a narrative form that masks ideological power under the guise of “truth.”

5: Closure and Certainty

• Description: Defoe’s narrative ends with moral and narrative closure — Crusoe is rescued, his faith rewarded, his empire reestablished.

• The structure supports a sense of divine order and human triumph.

• This ending reinforces the Enlightenment faith in reason, providence, and individual agency — all key features of early modern narrative realism.

B. Coetzee’s Fragmented and Metafictional Narrative

1: Postmodern Disruption of Realism

• Description: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe deliberately disrupts the realist conventions of Defoe’s original text. It questions the stability of narrative, truth, and authorship through a fragmented, multi-layered structure.

• The novel shifts between letters, dialogue, and shifting perspectives, refusing any single, authoritative version of the story.

• This fragmentation exposes the constructed nature of storytelling and resists the closure that Defoe’s narrative achieves.

2: Story within Story Metafictional Frame

• Description: Coetzee introduces a metafictional layer by inserting the author figure “Foe”  a clear allusion to Daniel Defoe himself.

• Susan Barton’s survival story is filtered through this writer, who edits, reshapes, and sometimes distorts her account to make it more “readable.”

• This frame reveals how all narratives are mediated by authors, publishers, and cultural expectations questioning the very idea of “truth” in literature.

 3: Fragmentation as Political and Aesthetic Strategy

• Description: Coetzee’s use of fragmented narrative mirrors the brokenness of colonial history. The absence of a clear, unified perspective reflects the disintegration of Enlightenment confidence in order and progress.

• Just as colonial subjects were denied coherent representation, the text itself refuses coherence  meaning becomes uncertain, deferred, and incomplete.

• This formal dislocation becomes a political act: it enacts the silence and disruption imposed by empire.

4: Friday’s Muteness as Structural Absence

• Description: Friday’s silence functions not only as a theme but as a formal device shaping the entire narrative.

• His inability to speak disrupts narrative flow  a constant void around which the story circles but never resolves.

• Coetzee thus transforms silence into structure: the unsaid becomes the organizing principle of the novel, exposing the limits of representation.

 5: Multiplicity of Voices and Unstable Authorship

• Description: In contrast to Defoe’s single, confident narrator, Foe presents multiple, unreliable narrators.

• Susan Barton seeks authorship; Foe seeks ownership; Friday remains mute. No single voice dominates  instead, meaning emerges from tension and absence.

• This multiplicity reflects what Mikhail Bakhtin calls heteroglossia: the coexistence of competing voices that resist totalizing control.

6: Open-Endedness and Ambiguity

• Description: The novel refuses closure  it ends with an enigmatic underwater scene, blurring the line between life and death, story and silence.

• The reader is left uncertain about what is real, what is imagined, and whose story has truly been told.

• This open form contrasts sharply with the moral resolution of Robinson Crusoe, reflecting the postmodern rejection of total meaning.

IV. Themes and Ideological Contrasts 

1. Colonialism and Imperial Ideology

1: Robinson Crusoe as the blueprint of the colonial imagination

• Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) is often read as the first English novel that embodies the colonial spirit of the 18th century.

• Crusoe’s transformation of the deserted island into a productive micro-empire mirrors Britain’s imperial project conquering, civilizing, and controlling “new” lands.

• Crusoe calls himself the “King” of the island, exercising absolute sovereignty over nature and the people (Friday), reproducing the hierarchical model of empire.

Description:
Crusoe’s colonization of the island is justified as rational, industrious, and divinely sanctioned. His acts of cultivation, governance, and conversion echo the Enlightenment ideals of order and progress, yet they mask the violence of colonial subjugation. Friday’s submission, his renaming, and his enforced Christianity reveal how the colonial subject is stripped of identity and molded into servitude.

2: Coetzee’s deconstruction of empire in Foe

• In Foe (1986), J. M. Coetzee rewrites this imperial myth from a postcolonial and postmodern perspective.

• The island, once a site of mastery, becomes a space of absence, silence, and loss symbolizing the ruins of colonial order.

• Coetzee replaces Crusoe’s confident dominion with ambiguity and doubt.

Description:
Through the characters of Susan Barton and Friday, Coetzee dismantles the colonial fantasy of control. Crusoe in Foe is not a heroic settler but a broken man living in isolation. The island ceases to be a utopia of civilization and becomes instead a metaphor for the failure of imperial reason. Friday’s silence, caused by the cutting of his tongue, powerfully signifies the colonial erasure of native voice and memory.

3: Postcolonial inversion of power

• In Defoe, speech equals civilization; silence equals savagery.

• Coetzee reverses this by making silence the site of resistance — Friday’s voicelessness becomes a refusal to be assimilated into the colonial narrative.

Description:

Coetzee’s Foe turns the colonial dynamic upside down. While Defoe’s Crusoe conquers and speaks, Coetzee’s Friday haunts the text through absence  an embodiment of the forgotten, unrecorded histories of the colonized. This shift reflects a postcolonial ethics of listening, where power lies not in speaking but in acknowledging what cannot be spoken.

2. Voice and Silence

 1: Narrative control in Defoe

• Crusoe’s first-person narration grants him total narrative power.

• His voice structures the entire reality of the novel he interprets, judges, and controls meaning.

• Friday’s minimal dialogue (“Yes, Master”) reflects submission and lack of agency.

Description:
Defoe’s narrative exemplifies logocentrism the belief in the dominance of reason and language as instruments of control. By narrating every detail, Crusoe asserts his mastery over chaos, reinforcing European superiority. The absence of Friday’s independent voice parallels the colonial denial of indigenous subjectivity.

2: The politics of silence in Coetzee

• Coetzee uses silence as a political metaphor. Friday’s tonguelessness dramatizes the violence of colonial representation.

• Susan Barton’s attempts to give him a voice fail she realizes that language itself is complicit in oppression.

Description:
In Foe, silence becomes a form of resistance and mystery. Coetzee refuses to translate Friday’s silence into speech, making it a permanent wound in the text. The final scene  the narrator diving into the wreck and hearing Friday’s underwater breath  evokes the persistence of the subaltern voice beneath history’s surface, unreachable yet alive.

3: Ethical implications of representation

• Defoe’s world believes in the transparency of narration.

• Coetzee’s world exposes its limits  the moral danger of speaking for the Other.

Description:
Through Susan’s failure to narrate Friday’s story, Coetzee raises ethical questions central to postcolonial theory: Who has the right to tell whose story? Can the colonized ever truly be represented within the colonizer’s language? Coetzee leaves these questions unresolved, emphasizing the violence of authorship and the necessity of silence as moral resistance.

3. Gender and Authorship

1: Absence of women in Defoe’s text

• Robinson Crusoe is a profoundly masculine narrative, celebrating autonomy and self-reliance.

• Women are absent or peripheral they exist outside the adventure, reinforcing patriarchal values.

Description:
Defoe’s novel glorifies the male colonial subject as rational, independent, and self-sufficient. The absence of female experience reflects the broader exclusion of women from Enlightenment subjectivity and the colonial project.

 2: Susan Barton’s centrality in Foe

• Coetzee introduces Susan Barton as a female protagonist and narrator who reclaims narrative space.

• Her struggle for authorship parallels the feminist struggle for voice and legitimacy in a male-dominated literary world.

Description:
Susan’s quest to have her story written by “Foe” reveals how women’s narratives are often appropriated and reshaped by patriarchal authority. Coetzee’s metafictional framework exposes the act of writing as an act of gendered power mirroring colonial appropriation.

 3: Feminist critique of authorship

• The novel asks: Who owns the story?

• Susan’s experience as a woman parallels Friday’s silence  both are marginalized voices erased by dominant authorship.

Description:
Through Susan’s conflict with Foe, Coetzee critiques not only colonial power but also the androcentric control of storytelling. The feminist subtext of Foe aligns with postcolonial theory, suggesting that both women and colonized subjects are denied narrative agency within patriarchal discourse.

4. Authorship and Power

 1: Crusoe as self-author and sovereign

• Crusoe’s diary and narrative establish him as the author of his own world.

• Writing becomes a metaphor for colonial authorship  ordering reality through language.

Description:
Defoe’s narrative reflects Enlightenment faith in the power of human reason to master the world. Crusoe’s act of writing mirrors imperial documentation  the transformation of unknown lands into knowable, ownable texts.

2: Coetzee’s metafictional critique

• Foe deconstructs the notion of authorship as power.

• Susan’s story is rewritten by Foe, who distorts her narrative to fit literary expectations.

• The author becomes a colonizer of stories.

Description:
Coetzee turns the act of writing into a site of struggle  between experience and representation, voice and authority. His metafictional style exposes how narratives shape ideology. Authorship, in this sense, is not neutral; it is a form of epistemic violence.

 3: Ethical authorship

• Coetzee redefines storytelling as ethical responsibility, not ownership.

• The true author listens to silences rather than imposing meaning.

Description:
By refusing closure and resolution, Coetzee practices an ethics of uncertainty. He transforms writing from an act of domination (as in Defoe) into an act of witnessing and humility, aligning with postmodern skepticism toward grand narratives.

5. Religion, Morality, and Humanism

 1: Defoe’s religious framework

• Robinson Crusoe is structured as a conversion narrative Crusoe’s survival affirms divine providence.

• Moral order is restored through faith and repentance.

Description:
Crusoe interprets his ordeal as a moral test. His conversion from sinner to believer mirrors Britain’s self-image as the moral empire, spreading Christian values to “savages.” Religion thus becomes a justification for colonial conquest.

2: Coetzee’s secular and ethical vision

• Foe abandons divine providence for moral ambiguity and existential uncertainty.

• There are no clear answers  only ethical questions.

Description:
Coetzee’s characters exist in a post-religious world, haunted by guilt and silence rather than guided by faith. This marks a shift from Defoe’s theocentric humanism to a postmodern, fragmented subjectivity, where meaning and morality are unstable.

 3: From salvation to haunting

• Defoe’s world ends with salvation and mastery.

• Coetzee’s world ends with submersion and haunting  the past returns as an unquiet presence.

Description:
The final scene of Foe, where Friday’s silent breath is heard under the water, symbolizes a moral reckoning  history’s drowned voices persist beneath the narratives of empire. Coetzee’s humanism is tragic and skeptical, grounded in empathy rather than divine order.

V. Symbolism and Space 

A. The Island

 1: In Defoe – The Island as a Microcosm of Civilization

• In Robinson Crusoe, the island functions as a microcosm of European civilization, where Crusoe re-establishes order, labor, and law in isolation.

• It embodies the Enlightenment ideals of rationality, progress, and human mastery over nature.

Description:
For Defoe, the island becomes a blank canvas upon which the colonial subject inscribes civilization. Crusoe cultivates land, builds shelter, domesticates animals, and imposes moral order  transforming wilderness into an image of Europe’s industrious spirit. This space mirrors the colonial mission: to “civilize” and “improve” the world according to European logic. The island’s transformation from chaos to productivity reinforces the myth of the self-made man and the moral legitimacy of empire.

2: In Coetzee – The Island as a Decaying and Desolate Space

• In Foe, Coetzee reimagines the same island as a ruined landscape, stripped of vitality and meaning.

• It no longer represents order or mastery but instead emptiness, silence, and decay  a space where language and identity disintegrate.

Description:
Coetzee’s island is marked by absence  no flourishing civilization, no divine plan, no redemptive progress. It becomes a metaphor for the limits of colonial imagination, revealing how the colonial project ultimately collapses under its own moral weight. The island’s silence and barrenness reflect postcolonial disillusionment, exposing the failure of Enlightenment ideals to account for the suffering and erasure they produced.

3: Spatial Inversion – From Mastery to Uncertainty

• In Defoe, space is possessable; in Coetzee, it is ungraspable.

• The same physical setting transforms from a stage of domination to one of existential and moral crisis.

Description:
Through this inversion, Coetzee challenges Defoe’s vision of the world as orderly and knowable. The island in Foe becomes a psychological and ethical space one that resists mapping or mastery. It stands for the postcolonial condition: fragmented, haunted, and marked by silence.

B. The Sea

Major Point 1: In Defoe  The Sea as Trial and Redemption

• In Robinson Crusoe, the sea symbolizes divine testing and human endurance.

• Each storm or shipwreck serves as a moral allegory  punishment for disobedience, followed by repentance and salvation.

Description:
Crusoe’s survival at sea reflects the Puritan ethic of suffering leading to spiritual growth. The sea’s chaos is subdued by Crusoe’s faith and labor, turning danger into moral revelation. It symbolizes the boundary between sin and salvation  between worldly temptation and divine grace.

 2: In Coetzee – The Sea as Loss and Unknowability

• In Foe, the sea represents the drowning of meaning  an abyss that swallows stories, history, and voice.

• It becomes the space where language collapses and where Friday’s silent body lies submerged in the final scene.

Description:
Coetzee’s sea is the opposite of redemption; it is a site of erasure. It represents what postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha calls “the unhomely”  a space of dislocation and historical trauma. The ocean becomes a metaphor for the repressed colonial past, where countless nameless bodies like Friday’s people have vanished without narrative.

 3: The Return of the Repressed

• The sea in Foe continuously returns as a haunting presence, bringing back fragments of untold histories.

• Unlike Defoe’s controlled world, Coetzee’s ocean cannot be conquered it speaks in echoes, silences, and submersion.

Description:
The recurring imagery of the sea  waves, drowning, breathing under water symbolizes the uncontainable memory of colonial violence. The final image of the narrator descending into the wreck and hearing Friday’s breath signifies the return of the subaltern, the voice that empire tried to bury but cannot silence forever.

C. Friday’s Tongue

1: The Tongue as Central Metaphor of Colonial Silencing

• Friday’s tongue  cut out by slavers  is the most potent symbol in Coetzee’s rewriting.

• It stands for the erasure of the Other’s voice, the physical manifestation of what colonialism does to the subaltern subject.

Description:
In Defoe, Friday’s speech is minimal but functional he speaks enough to affirm Crusoe’s authority. In Coetzee, the tongue’s absence signifies irretrievable loss. Friday cannot narrate his story; others (Susan, Foe) attempt to speak for him. The wound is both literal and epistemological — it represents the structural impossibility of giving the colonized full speech within colonial discourse.

 2: Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous question resonates deeply here: Can the subaltern speak?

• Coetzee’s answer is complex  the subaltern (Friday) cannot speak, and when others try to represent him, they reinscribe colonial authority.

Description:
Susan Barton’s repeated efforts to “give Friday a voice” end up appropriating him further. This dramatizes Spivak’s argument that the subaltern’s voice is unheard within dominant epistemic structures because it must pass through colonial language, it is always distorted. Coetzee thus transforms Friday’s silence into a political critique of representation itself.

 3: Silence as Resistance and Survival

• Though voiceless, Friday’s silence resists assimilation.

• His muteness becomes a form of enigmatic power  a refusal to conform to colonial or authorial expectation.

Description:
By the end of Foe, Friday’s silence swallows the entire narrative, as if reclaiming the last word through wordlessness. His breath under water becomes the novel’s final voice, dissolving the distinction between speech and silence, self and other. Coetzee thus transforms trauma into endurance, turning silence into a moral and aesthetic center of the postcolonial condition.

VI. Receiver Analysis: The Shifting Reader and the Ethics of Interpretation

1. Reception of Robinson Crusoe (1719): The Enlightenment Reader

Context of Reading:
When Robinson Crusoe was first published in 1719, readers perceived it as a tale of adventure, faith, and human triumph rather than a political allegory. It catered to the 18th-century bourgeois reader, reflecting the values of self-reliance, industry, and divine providence. Crusoe’s journey was interpreted as a moral allegory of Christian redemption and rational enterprise.

Ideological Function:
The early reader identified with Crusoe as a model of Enlightenment virtue rational, resourceful, and God-fearing. The text’s colonial and racial hierarchies were invisible to this audience; rather, they were seen as natural extensions of “civilization.” The “reader’s horizon of expectation” (Hans Robert Jauss) was shaped by imperial ideology  making Defoe’s novel both entertainment and instruction in the ethics of empire.

Critical Evolution:
By the 19th and 20th centuries, readers began to interpret Crusoe as an emblem of colonial ambition and capitalist subjectivity. Marxist critics viewed Crusoe as a proto-capitalist entrepreneur, while postcolonial critics such as Edward Said (Culture and Imperialism) recontextualized him as the archetype of Western imperialism. Thus, the modern reader sees Defoe’s realism not as neutral truth but as an ideological performance that constructs the “civilized self” through the subjugation of the “Other.”

2. Reception of Foe (1986): The Postcolonial and Postmodern Reader

Context of Reading:
Coetzee’s Foe was received in a world already conscious of colonial histories, feminist theory, and narrative politics. The late-20th-century reader approaches literature with skepticism toward singular truths and authority. Hence, Foe’s fragmented narrative and metafictional style directly appeal to readers trained in postmodern and postcolonial discourse.

Reader’s Role:
Unlike Defoe’s confident narrative, Coetzee makes the reader complicit in the process of meaning-making. The silence of Friday and the gaps in Susan Barton’s narration force readers to confront their desire for closure and explanation. The act of interpretation itself becomes ethically charged — the reader must decide whether to “speak for” the silent or to acknowledge the limits of understanding.

This aligns with Wolfgang Iser’s theory of the “implied reader”  Coetzee constructs a reader who must fill narrative gaps, but only to realize that those gaps mark the limits of language and representation. The text resists total comprehension, mirroring the postcolonial condition of fractured identity and incomplete history.

3. Shifting Critical Perspectives

The critical perception of Robinson Crusoe and Foe has evolved dramatically over time, reflecting shifts in historical context, ideology, and literary theory. Each era has read these texts through its own moral, political, and aesthetic lens transforming their meanings for successive generations of readers.

a) Early Reception – Moral and Religious Reading

When Robinson Crusoe was first published in 1719, readers admired it as a tale of Christian perseverance, moral discipline, and divine providence. Crusoe’s survival on the island was interpreted as an allegory of faith, repentance, and human ingenuity. Defoe’s audience, shaped by Enlightenment ideals, saw Crusoe as a model of the industrious, rational man guided by Providence — embodying the emerging Protestant work ethic.

b) Colonial and Imperial Reading

By the 19th century, the novel began to be celebrated as a manifestation of British colonial spirit. Crusoe’s taming of the island and mastery over Friday were viewed as symbols of European civilization spreading order to the “savage” world. This period saw Crusoe as a hero of empire, reflecting the imperialist ideology of Victorian Britain.

c) Marxist and Postcolonial Reinterpretations

In the 20th century, critics like Karl Marx identified Crusoe as the prototype of the capitalist individual, turning survival into economic enterprise. Later, postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said (Culture and Imperialism) and Gayatri Spivak questioned the ideological assumptions of Defoe’s narrative, revealing how it constructs racial and cultural hierarchies. The focus shifted from Crusoe’s heroism to his domination  from adventure to exploitation.

d) Feminist and Postmodern Rewriting

Coetzee’s Foe (1986) marks a turning point in this evolving critical history. Writing in a postcolonial and feminist age, Coetzee reimagines Defoe’s world from the margins. Susan Barton replaces Crusoe as narrator, exposing how female voices and colonial subjects were silenced in the original text. Coetzee’s metafictional approach also reflects postmodern skepticism — questioning authorship, truth, and the power of language itself.

e) Contemporary Academic Perspective

Today, Robinson Crusoe and Foe are read together as intertextual companions — the colonial text and its postcolonial counter-text. Modern readers and scholars approach them through interdisciplinary lenses: reader-response theory, deconstruction, ecocriticism, and ethics of alterity. Crusoe’s voice represents the confident discourse of empire; Friday’s silence embodies the unspoken trauma of the oppressed. This shifting critical journey reveals how literature evolves alongside human consciousness  from conquest to questioning, from domination to dialogue.

4. The Reader as Witness

Coetzee transforms the reader into an ethical witness rather than a passive consumer. Foe’s ambiguity refuses comfort  the reader must face the moral discomfort of not knowing, of being unable to decode Friday’s silence. This creates what Emmanuel Levinas calls the ethics of alterity  an obligation toward the Other that cannot be fulfilled through knowledge or mastery.

In contrast, Defoe’s reader occupies the position of mastery and control, comfortably identifying with Crusoe’s authority. The narrative provides closure and moral reassurance. Coetzee denies both, transforming reading into an act of listening, humility, and responsibility.

5. Academic and Cultural Reception

Defoe’s Canonization:
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe became a central text in the English canon, taught as the prototype of the modern novel. Its narrative of individualism and moral fortitude has been adapted across genres and media, from colonial adventure stories to survival films, reinforcing its mythic status in Western imagination.

Coetzee’s Subversion:
Coetzee’s Foe, by contrast, gained recognition within the frameworks of postcolonial literary studies and feminist narratology. It is praised for transforming a colonial classic into a site of resistance and ethical inquiry. Critics like Derek Attridge and Gayatri Spivak see Foe as a model of responsible postcolonial writing  one that refuses to “speak for” the silenced, instead exposing the limits of representation itself.

Contemporary Pedagogical Reception:
In universities today, Crusoe and Foe are often taught together as a textual dialogue  the “colonial original” and the “postcolonial response.” Students are encouraged to read Defoe through Coetzee and Coetzee through Defoe, recognizing how literature evolves through acts of critical rewriting and readerly resistance.

Conclusion

The dialogue between Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe reveals not merely two narratives separated by centuries, but two contrasting visions of storytelling, authorship, and human identity. Defoe’s Crusoe celebrates the Enlightenment ideals of reason, faith, and mastery over nature  a narrative that mirrors the birth of colonial modernity and the capitalist self. In contrast, Coetzee’s Foe dismantles this imperial narrative, exposing its silences and ethical blind spots. Through Susan Barton’s fragmented narration and Friday’s haunting muteness, Coetzee reimagines the colonial encounter as a space of loss, erasure, and resistance rather than conquest and control.

While Defoe writes from the center of empire, Coetzee writes from its margins, turning the act of storytelling itself into a political and moral question. His novel forces readers to confront how history is written  and who gets to speak within it. The shift from Crusoe to Foe thus symbolizes a transformation in both literary consciousness and reader responsibility: from the confident assertion of universal truth to the humble acknowledgment of partial perspectives and silenced voices.

Ultimately, Coetzee’s Foe does not seek to replace Defoe’s Crusoe, but to dialogue with it, revealing how every narrative contains both what is said and what is unsaid. The two texts together trace the evolution of literature from colonial authority to postcolonial self-awareness from the making of empire to the questioning of power. In this way, the journey from Crusoe to Foe becomes the reader’s own journey: a movement from mastery to empathy, from certainty to reflection, and from possession of the world to understanding its profound complexity.

 

Comparative of Robinson Crusoe and Foe by Alina Alyna

References

• Alyna, Alina. “Comparative of Robinson Crusoe and Foe.” Scribd, www.scribd.com/document/91074132/Comparative-of-Robinson-Crusoe-and-Foe.
• Bishop, G. Scott. “J. M. Coetzee’s Foe: A Culmination and a Solution to a Problem of White Identity.” World Literature Today, vol. 64, no. 1, 1990, pp. 54–57. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/40145792. Accessed 2 Nov. 2025.
• Coetzee, J. M. Foe. New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Viking, 1987.
• Goh, Benjamin. “Postcolonial Temporality of J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986).” Law And Humanities, vol. 17, no. 1, Jan. 2023, pp. 112–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/17521483.2022.2148369.