Foe Essay Questions

Why might Coetzee have wanted to revisit Robinson Crusoe? What topics and themes of the original novel is he interested in?

In his novel Foe, Coetzee revisits Daniel Defoe's classic tale, Robinson Crusoe, in a way that might first be read as a post-colonial and feminist revision. Rather than putting the famous castaway Crusoe at the center of the story, he focuses instead Crusoe's slave, Friday. Rather than telling the tale from a male point of view he tells it from the female character Susan Barton, who he presents as the unknown female castaway also on Crusoe's island. But while Coetzee turns to the points of view of a slave and woman, it is no simple feat for him to represent these subaltern, marginalized perspectives. Instead of attempting to represent these characters' oppression, Coetzee novel instead becomes an examination of the challenges of representation.

What is the relevance of Susan Barton's voice in the Robinson Crusoe narrative? Is her point of view worthwhile? Analyze and discuss her contribution to the iconic narrative.

At first, Susan Barton may seem an unlikely narrator for an eighteenth-century tale of high seas adventure. Her narrative voice is sober and critical and she strips any romanticized language from her version of events. She refuses to sensationalize any part of her own experience and the story of Robinson Crusoe is rendered as a story of a senile man on a parched, windy island. Rather than tell a tale of adventures, she comes to tell a tale of the attempt to tell a tale. Yet the more she avoids sensationalism, the more she reflects on her point of view and questions the nature of storytelling, and the more her narrative evolves into a resonant and important inquiry into the power of narration.

Does Friday understand language? Analyze his character, role, and what you imagine is his point of view.

The power of narrative fiction comes from the power of representation, the ability of an author to put words to a character's mind and to illustrate their experience. This power however is also a liability, putting an author at risk of misrepresentation. Of course it may be argued that any representation is misrepresentation, that no author could ever accurately depict the mind of another. But for a white male author like Coetzee writing a black slave whose tongue has been cut out, misrepresentation would be no minor offense. Indeed, it would perpetuate the long historical violence in which the white voice has more power than that of the black voice. Coetzee is acutely aware of his authorial power and the danger to exploit it when he develops his character Friday. Instead of using his power as the author to write Friday's mind, he attempts to give Friday the power by withholding Friday's interior experience. Instead of offering his reader access to the question of whether or not Friday understands language, he turns the question back on the reader. Why do we want to know the inner experience of the tongueless slave? What is our interest as readers in accessing the knowledge of a character who has been the subject of terrible violence?

Are we meant to read Susan Barton as an autonomous voice, or she a character being written by the character Foe? Discuss.

JM Coetzee's novel Foe is a metafictional masterpiece, placing one author in intimate encounter with another, calling attention to the novel's own author and leading the reader to question who the real author actually is. The novel, which turns its main character into its own author, at once becomes an instruction manual for the creative construction of fiction. As Susan Barton comes face to face with the alleged historical author of Robinson Crusoe, a novel from which she was erased, and as she argues with him over the correct construction of her story, the reader of Foe is made aware of the precarious nature of authorship and ambiguous questions around authorial autonomy. While an author has great power in developing a character, there are also great forces that influence that creation that are beyond the author's control. The question that is opened through the metafictional inquiries of Foe is whether it's the author who writes the characters or the characters who write themselves.

Closely read the last passage of the novel. Whose point of view is it from? What is happening? How do you interpret the final sentence?

The final passage of Foe turns to Friday, or an ambiguous semblance of Friday, the tongueless slave who cannot tell his own story. But how is it possible that the character Friday that we've seen walking and breathing in the real time of Coetzee's novel is now found as a spectral presence chained to sunken slave ship on the ocean floor? If Friday is a skeleton in a shipwreck, then are we to read Susan Barton's story as a ghost story? Is her experience, seeking a voice and narrator for the castaway slave, the experience of a specter, haunting an author? If indeed we take the final passage of Foe at face value, then we learn that Friday never survived; instead he went down, chained to the hull, with his story never told. The final sentence of the novel speaks to this silencing, suggesting that repressed voices of slavery are as present and all-encompassing as the ocean. A close reading of the final passage shows how it is that the experiences of slavery affect every aspect of our word - indeed we hear these suffering voices. Yet, as with the voice of the ocean, we don't have the language to interpret its meaning.