Analysis Of The Barbaric Girl By Colonel Joll

The idea of impending self annihilation causes humans to go to extremes in order to preserve their Empire. The barbaric girl, representing a threat to familiarity, is ravaged by torture conducted by Colonel Joll and secluded in the outpost. In this passage, she is obsessively examined by the magistrate, portraying the Empire’s hysteria over the possibility of their downfall. The magistrate’s perplexion concerning his relationship with the barbarian girl comments on the intricacy of torture which can be practiced beyond a physical plane. Through the magistrate and Empire officials the author distinguishes the universal wickedness in human curiosity revealed by panic and the objective of torturers to subdue their own fear.
This passage illustrates
The ponderous tone of the narrator conveyed through the assaulting diction “entry”, “hunt,” and “no less intimate”, portrays the girl as an object of scrutiny. Her foreign presence, described as a “secret body”, disturbs the magistrate. She serves as a symbol for ambiguity which he struggles to understand provoking him to resort to mental abuse. He is perplexed by his infatuation and questions his conduct, “ I am responsible, or so it seems, otherwise why do I keep it?”. As a consequence of referring to the girl as “it”, she is objectified as a relic of mystery that entices him to decipher it. The magistrate is overwhelmed with the notion that it is his duty to discover the truth concerning why humans, especially civilized ones like the Empire, inflict pain rather than reason. As a consequence, he harasses the girl as a form of self-denial in believing he, a fatherly figure, is incapable of such acts. Similarly, in an analogy, Coetzee compares the girl to an unexplored landscape of which is “only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry”. This image created by the phrase “hunt back and forth” expands the foreign divide between barbarians and the Empire through the association of hunting beasts with torturing the outsiders. His perspective of the girl as a vessel of information, rather than a human being, parallels the point of view of Colonel Joll who disregards the value of life over the safety of the Empire. Overall, the interactions with the barbarian girl exhibit how the Empire is fearful of what they do not understand causing them to go to extremes to establish