Waiting For The Barbarians Analysis

After that, the Chief of the Nambikwara only answer to the anthropologist by drawing wavy lines, and he pretends to understand what they mean. This play-act gave the Chief the opportunity to amaze his fellow companions and ‘persuade them that his intermediacy was responsible for the exchange [of gifts], that he had allied himself with the white man, and that he could now share in his secrets’ (Derrida, 1976, p.126). Substantially, this scene comes to show how quickly the Chief understood the power and use of writing and used it to reinforce his political authority. In that sense, writing becomes associated with power rather than knowledge. Thus, illiteracy becomes associated with innocence and writing with violence (Cobley, 2002, p.124)
It provides the novel with the ‘essential premise, that in order for something like an empire to exist, it must have something to exist against-an opposite; an Other, against which to define itself’ (Kossew, 1998). In other words, it depends upon the Other, a barbarian enemy to strengthen the national feeling of the state. ‘White, to be conceivable, relies upon the conception of black; and civilization needs barbarism’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, 2004). Coming back to the analysis of the first paragraph in the novel, one can say that Coetzee does well at establishing, immediately, a sort of archetypal indefiniteness in time as well as in space which indirectly refers to the theme of Otherness (Al-Saidi, 2014). Colonel Joll's task is to make sure that the laws and the frontiers of the Empire are respected, and to keep barbarians in their place through military force. "In reflecting on his own and other characters' deeds, the Magistrate initially plays the familiar role of the witness, an outsider to the depicted violence: he incarnates the moral viewpoint in a world which seems prey to bureaucratized evil, of which it is not difficult to imagine examples" (Kossew,
Only now Coetzee's choice of title is fully grasped, adapted from last lines of by the Cavafy: what does this sudden uneasiness mean, and this confusion? Because it is night and the barbarians have not arrived from the frontiers and they say that there are no barbarians any longer and now/ what will become of us without barbarians?/ These people were a kind of solution" (Kossew, 1998). The Empire cannot sustain itself without the barbarians, because then it has no purpose of existence. The binary of the Self and the Other and the lies about their threat is what kept it alive. Thus, it becomes apparent that Levi-Strauss’s conclusions are confirmed in Coetzee’s story and give a detailed explanation of the ambiguously defined Empire and its means of staying in powering. In the end, however, the Empire fails to sustain its power and control and begins its way towards