Critique on "Waiting for the Barbarians"

 

"Waiting for the Barbarians" is a novel published in 1980. “Waiting for the Barbarians” is about morality and it deals with human cruelty. The title is from a tone from the Greek post “Constantine P. Cavafy”. The story was about imaginary Empire. In the novel time was unspecified. There was Barbarian tribes, who were living at the edge of the Empire.

Waiting for the Barbarians” somehow against of humanity and it, challenges humanity in many ways. As we know, Colonel Joll was a cruel fellow. He tortured people without any crime. The main character of the novel was the Magistrate. He became the victim of injustice. There was no evidence against him, if we look at the depth of the novel. The Magistrate was having peaceful personality. He was the territorial frontier of the Empire. He was a person of authority and he was quite old. He loses his power when the Empire sent an army to protect the town from the Barbarians.
At the same time, he saved one tortured barbarian girl from the street. Colonel Joll tortured her. Her tribe people left her behind. There was also a dialogue on it by the magistrate:

“However kindly she may be treated by her own people, she will never be courted and married in the normal way: she is marked for life as the property of a stranger, and no one will approach her save in the spirit of lugubrious sensual pity that she detected and rejected in me. ( Coetzee, 1982: 135)”.

The barbarian girl had only support of the magistrate. He was different from the Empire people. He also questions to the Colonel Joll:

“How do you find it possible to eat afterwards, after you have been working with people? (...) I have imagined that one would want to wash one’s hands, but no ordinary washing would be enough, one would require priestly intervention, a ceremonial of cleansing, don’t you think? Some kind of purging of one’s soul too – that is how I imagined it. Otherwise, how would it be possible to return to everyday life- to sit down a table, for instance, and break bread with one’s family or one’s comrades? (Coetzee, 1982: 126)”

“Waiting for the Barbarians” can also be criticised as violence on women. The women were marginalised by tribe people and by power show the dark side of the time. The best example was that barbarian girl, who was semi blind and black but she had to pay for being woman.

The magistrate’s character is static. At the same time Colonel Joll’s character representing colonial time. He misused his power. According to feminist film critic,
“Woman is deprived of a gaze, deprived of subjectivity and repeatedly transformed into the object of a masculine desire”

Magistrate became helpless and Colonel Joll, who represents the empire, the authority, and the realm of man, is narrated in the following way in the novel;

                “I try to call out something, a word of blind fear, a shriek, but the rope is now so tight that I am strangled, speechless.(…)
                I am swinging loose. The breeze lifts my smock and plays with my naked body.
                I am relaxed, floating. In a woman’s clothes. “
                (Coetzee,1982:120)

Thus, “Waiting for the Barbarians” is the novel about human violence and the waiting which never ends.