Summary
The point of view shifts to the first person and the tense to the present. The new narrator comes up the stairs and enters Foe’s room. They find Friday asleep in the alcove and Susan and Foe asleep in the bed. They get low beside Friday and examine him, listen to his breath. It’s almost inaudible. Coming closer the narrator notices a scar on Friday’s neck—the scar of a rope or a chain. The narrator finds Susan’s manuscript and begins to read her story from where it opens in the first chapter of the novel. She slips from the boat, unable to row anymore and enters the water. The chapter proceeds with Susan’s story, in her voice. But instead of swimming to shore, she goes down under the water, into the seaweed. There below is the wreck of a ship. She enters into the dead water of the cabin where all is preserved. There is Susan Barton and her captain, bloated and white, floating in their nightclothes, their arms stretched up as though in blessing. She passes them and goes on. Under the transom of the stern, she finds Friday. He’s on the ground, half buried in sand. She calls to him, touches his wooly hair, tugs on the chain around his neck. “But this is not a place of words,” she says. “This is a place where bodies are their own signs. This is the home of Friday.”
Friday’s body turns and stretches out, his face to her. His skin is tight over his bones. She pries on his teeth and his mouth opens and he emits a stream, “without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body, and out upon me” (157). The stream is like water, like the ocean itself, it covers everything, reaches every shore, “Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face” (157). So go the final lines of the novel.
Analysis
In the final chapter of the novel, we enter full-fantasy mode as Susan descends into the wreck where a ghost-like figure of Friday is chained. Though thoroughly fantastical, the image points to the actual. The actual Friday of the wrecked slave ship is the man who went down in chains, the one at the bottom of the ocean.
But what of this fantasy of Coetzee’s that the body itself can speak, that wounds themselves are vocal? What is Coetzee doing by imagining that the trauma of the Middle Passage that has rendered Friday mute is somehow being rectified by a new corporeal language, making the body legible, the wounds legible (not just mute)? Is this not a kind of recuperative fantasy, predicated on a idea that such a language could be possible – or more accurately, that readers might become literate in that tongue? While Coetzee may not be attempting to say literature might redeem slavery and colonialism, he is surely saying something about the novelist's role in seeking out means to represent voiceless bodies.
At the end of the novel, he attempts to give the subaltern the power to speak. He puts a substance in Friday’s mouth that moves out of it like water: “it flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending” (157). The voice he gives the subaltern resembles the ocean itself. It is all encompassing and reaches everything. But is this a fair voice? Is this not overly poetic and ambiguous and another form of silencing? Of course, though, there can be no singular, correct way of representing those who can’t speak. Maybe the writer’s position will always be ethically flawed whether they turn to the heavily figurative or starkly realist. Maybe Coetzee here suggests, though, that the writer’s power is their responsibility. For clearly it’s an immense power with the means to suggest, as he does in the final image, that the experiences of slaves and subjected peoples, of all those without a voice, is the substance that flows through everything in the world, connecting it, binding it together. In his haunting and terribly sad final scene, Friday’s suffering is brought to life.
