Summary
Friday finds Mr. Foe’s robes and wigs. He puts a robe on and begins to dance, twirling in a circle. He does it for hours and hours, with his eyes shut. As the sun moves around the house between morning and noon, he follows it and dances in its light. He’s impenetrable when he dances. Susan sells off Mr. Foe’s goods, piece by piece. She sells his clothes and his books and all of his mirrors because she doesn’t like to look at herself and see how weathered she’s becoming. She comes across a box of recorders. She brings one to Friday and he plays his old tune from the island. She learns the tune and tries to communicate with Friday by mixing up some notes in the tune. But Friday doesn’t react. He plays the same tune. He dances and plays at the same time.
Susan and Friday begin to walk to Bristol. She has decided to go back there to find a ship that’s going to Africa and to send him back. Friday can’t stay in England. As they walk along the roads she tells people that Friday is her footman and that they were robbed. People react oddly. She has brought some of Mr. Foe’s books. She trades one for shoes. On gloomy roads she realizes that Friday is no protection to her as he has no self-defense response. One night, she and Friday escape some drunken soldiers. They run into a field. Mud-soaked, they go into an inn but they’re turned away for being gypsies. They find a barn and hide in it, wet and cold. In the dark, she begins to do Friday’s dance. As she does it, she loses all track of where she is and what’s happening. She enters a trance. The world disappears. She finally understands why Friday does the dance: “to remove himself, or his spirit from… England, and from [Susan] too,” (104). It upsets her to think that he would want to remove himself from her.
They press on, and she regretfully sells another book. Then, on the side of the road, they find a dead baby in a bundle. They leave it. She remarks to herself that Friday has no cannibalistic appetite. She wonders if he’d go back and eat it if she wasn’t there. She meditates on her ideas of Friday’s cannibalism. Once Cruso put the idea in her mind, she could never get rid of it. She would look at his mouth and imagine human flesh as having passed through and how once you had the taste for it you always wanted it. They sleep under hedges. They get called gypsies. She wonders what gypsies really are and if she’s becoming one. She hasn’t washed.
They arrive in Bristol. Friday shows distinct signs of recognition when they see the docks and ships. She hears of a ship called the “Indianman” that’s going to Africa. She finds it and speaks to a shipmate, telling him that Friday is a free man. She asks if they’ll take him to Africa. The shipmate asks her where in Africa and lets her know that it’s quite big. She says that she’s sure that Friday will recognize his home when he sees it. She shows the shipmates the papers that she had put in a pouch that hangs around Friday’s neck, stating that he was freed by his former master. The shipmates agree to take him. One of them pockets the paper. But Susan guesses their scheme to sell him back into slavery. She takes the paper back and brings Friday with her. She asks around for a ship to take him, but she realizes that if she lets him go, he’ll end up back on a plantation. Friday stays in England.
Analysis
Susan has been waiting for something, but for what? All the while in the house, when the girl comes and goes and when Susan works on writing, there has been a large, dark presence downstairs—a man whose life experience is a mystery to her—a mystery that she is incapable of confronting directly. She searches for ways to understand Friday, but fails to find them. She sees only the flatness of his gaze and hears only his silence. He’s almost a flat character, and yet certain traits make him entirely three-dimensional: the missing tongue, the eruption of new emotion as he dances in robes. He lurks downstairs as Susan frets and waits and learns some things about the craft of writing. The mystery of Friday is a quiet force in the story, waiting to be made central or waiting for Susan to make it so.
Susan’s confessional thoughts on Friday’s cannibalism depict the ways that the imagination can be infected with an idea. She explains that it was Cruso who gave her the idea and afterward she embellished and elaborated it in her mind and now continues to think it, though it’s clearly not true. This prejudice of hers reflects the broader prejudices likely caused by Daniel Defoe’s depiction of cannibals in Robinson Crusoe.
In Defoe’s book, Friday is originally a cannibal that Crusoe teaches and converts to Christianity. Friday then becomes a crusader against cannibalism. In Coetzee’s version, Friday can’t be Christianized because he can’t learn language and therefore remains forever cast as the cannibal in Susan’s mind, despite showing no signs. Coetzee’s reflection of the older narrative shows the power of narrative to taint the imagination. Non-Christian Africans after Robinson Crusoe would easily have been thought of as cannibals in the English imaginary.
