Waiting for the Barbarians

Waiting for the Barbarians Literary Elements

Genre

Fiction: Political allegory

Setting and Context

Fictionalized region loosely representing apartheid South Africa

Narrator and Point of View

Close first-person

Tone and Mood

Tragic, dramatic, ironic.

Protagonist and Antagonist

The magistrate (protagonist) Colonel Joll and the Empire (antagonist)

Major Conflict

Antagonism between one man and his empire. Internal conflict.

Climax

The public torture of a group of prisoners in which the magistrate finally speaks out against the brutalities of the Empire.

Foreshadowing

The first instance of torture foreshadows brutalities to come.

Understatement

n/a

Allusions

The title is an allusion to a poem by CP Cavafy, "Waiting for the Barbarians."

Imagery

Paradox

Parallelism

Metonymy and Synecdoche

Personification

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