Waiting for Chapter IV!

Waiting for the Barbarians starts by introducing the narrator, who we intuit to be uneducated or unexposed, since he has never seen a pair of sunglasses before. But as the novel progresses we learn our narrator is a Magistrate and that he seems to possess more and more intelligence.

This book, in the tradition of AP English, does not give its characters or its setting actual names, besides the character, Colonel Joll. We only know our narrator by his title, Magistrate. The novel is set in a nameless colony of a nameless, country-less “Empire.” It seems obvious that Coetzee doesn’t name anything because he wants his main point (which we don’t know at this point) to seem relevant in every place being colonized by an empire.

Coetzee’s style is much clearer than any novels we have read thus far. His style consists mostly of dialogue supplemented with the interwoven thoughts of the Magistrate. Many times these thoughts are in the form of a rhetorical question. I liked the way Coetzee has each character transforming. He makes the Magistrate seem like a slave in the beginning and by the end we see him as an intelligent leader and even though he is not superior by rank to Colonel Joll, he definitely seems morally superior, besides his sexual decisions. Coetzee also develops the Magistrate’s slut from a slut to a smarter, important, and influential woman.

For a while I felt as though a more accurate title for this novel would be Waiting (but not for long) for the Magistrate’s Next Sexual Experience. I am not sure why there have been so many sexual scenes thus far in the story. They seem to have no purpose.

However, after reading the last line of section three, “the army is here, the promised campaign against the barbarians is under way,” my pessimism diminished as my excitement grew. I didn’t much like the beginning of this book, but I guess Coetzee wanted us to wait for the Barbarians.

I write this blog optimistically because now I have waited for the Barbarians long enough, and because the last line of chapter three finally establishes that the conflict–the Empire taking the Barbarians’ land and the Barbarians being mad about it–that was supposed to be driving the plot is finally going to start driving the plot in chapter four! (390)