This Blog is a Part of Thinking Activity on Daniel Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Foe’ assigned by Megha Trivedi Ma'am, Department of Of English MKBU.
- Robinson Crusoe – The protagonist and narrator, who represents the ideal of self-made manhood and the rational, industrious spirit of the Enlightenment.
- Friday – The native man rescued by Crusoe; he symbolizes both the colonial subject and the “Other” in European imagination.
- Crusoe’s Father – A symbol of wisdom and social stability, representing the moderate life that Crusoe rejects.
- The Captain – The Englishman whom Crusoe helps to restore to power; he serves as a means of Crusoe’s eventual return home.
- Silence and the Voice of the Subaltern
- Authorship and Narrative Authority
- Colonialism and Power
- Gender and Marginalization
J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) is a postmodern and postcolonial reimagining of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The novel follows Susan Barton, a woman who is shipwrecked and finds herself on an island with Cruso and his mute servant Friday, whose tongue has been cut out. Unlike Defoe’s Crusoe, Cruso is tired and unambitious, showing no interest in building or recording his life. After their rescue, Cruso dies on the voyage home, leaving Susan to tell their story. She seeks out the writer Mr. Foe (a fictional version of Defoe) to help her publish it, but he wants to change her plain truth into an adventure tale. Susan struggles to preserve her voice and Friday’s silence against Foe’s manipulative storytelling. Friday’s muteness becomes a haunting symbol of the silenced colonized subject whose story remains untold. The novel blends fiction, history, and metafiction, questioning who has the right to speak and write history. Coetzee exposes the power imbalance between author and subject, and between colonizer and colonized. In the end, the story dissolves into ambiguity, leaving Friday’s silence as the only lasting truth.
Comparative and Critical analysis of Daniel Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Foe’.
Introduction
Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) is often hailed as the birth of the English novel and a landmark text of colonial modernity. It narrates the story of a solitary Englishman who, through faith, labor, and reason, transforms a deserted island into a miniature empire. Yet, beneath its adventurous exterior lies the spirit of Enlightenment rationalism and imperial conquest, making Robinson Crusoe both a survival story and a metaphor for colonial expansion.
Over two and a half centuries later, J.M. Coetzee, one of the most profound postcolonial voices of the twentieth century, revisits Defoe’s text in his 1986 novel Foe. Coetzee’s Foe is not a retelling but a revisionist critique that exposes how power operates through storytelling itself. Through metafictional narrative and postmodern techniques, Coetzee questions authorship, narrative authority, and the silencing of the subaltern, especially in the context of postcolonial South Africa.
From Empire to Critique: Shifting the Narrative Lens
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe encapsulates the optimism of imperial England. Crusoe, the self-reliant castaway, embodies the rise of the bourgeois individual who masters nature and “civilizes” the other. His dominion over the island and over Friday mirrors the colonial ideology of superiority and the expansionist drive of the British Empire. The text celebrates reason, labor, and faith as virtues that justify conquest aligning with the emerging capitalist and Christian ethos of 18th-century Europe.
In contrast, Coetzee’s Foe dismantles these very assumptions. Set against the historical backdrop of apartheid and postcolonial identity, Coetzee rewrites Defoe’s island narrative to expose the constructed nature of “truth” and “civilization.” His version strips away adventure and heroism, replacing them with ambiguity, silence, and fragmentation. The novel critiques how the colonial mindset was perpetuated through storytelling itself revealing that what we accept as “truth” in canonical literature often stems from the erasure of non-European voices.
Authorship and Narrative Power
While Defoe’s narrative grants Crusoe complete control over his world, Foe relocates the site of power to the act of writing itself. The central struggle in Coetzee’s text is not about physical survival, but about who gets to tell the story.
The protagonist, Susan Barton, a female castaway, attempts to recount her experience with Cruso (Coetzee’s stripped-down version of Crusoe) and the mute slave, Friday. When she seeks to publish her story, the professional author Mr. Foe (a fictional representation of Daniel Defoe) insists on altering her account adding cannibals, lost daughters, and sensational details to fit the expectations of the English reading public.
Through this metafictional conflict, Coetzee reveals how literary authority mirrors colonial domination. Just as Crusoe imposed order upon the island, Mr. Foe imposes his version of truth upon Susan’s narrative. Authorship becomes a tool of power shaping, editing, and silencing voices that do not conform to the established norms of storytelling.
As Marco Caracciolo (2012) notes, Coetzee’s Foe transforms the “embodiment of meaning” into a site of contestation, where the body and silence of the oppressed speak louder than language itself.
Friday: From the ‘Grateful Savage’ to the Silenced Subaltern
Perhaps the most radical reimagining in Foe is Coetzee’s portrayal of Friday.
In Defoe’s novel, Friday is depicted as the perfect colonial subject—obedient, converted, and thankful to his white master. Crusoe’s act of naming and teaching him English signifies not liberation but possession, as Friday’s identity is rewritten within a colonial framework.
Coetzee, however, strips Friday of speech altogether. His tongue has been cut out, either by slavers or by Cruso himself—a detail never clarified, reinforcing the opacity of historical violence. Friday’s silence becomes a haunting symbol of the unspeakable trauma of enslavement and colonization.
Susan Barton’s repeated attempts to give Friday a voice through writing, music, and empathy end in failure. His muteness challenges the assumption that the oppressed can be represented by others, even well-intentioned allies. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1990) suggests in “Theory in the Margin,” Coetzee’s Foe illustrates how the subaltern’s voice is not merely unheard but untranslatable within the language of the colonizer.
Friday’s silence, then, becomes a form of resistance a refusal to conform to the linguistic structures that once enslaved him. It transforms him from a passive subject into a symbol of enduring historical absence and suppressed truth.
Susan Barton: Gender, Storytelling, and the Quest for Voice
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is a thoroughly masculine narrative, where women exist only at the margins unnamed, peripheral, and voiceless. Coetzee deliberately subverts this by centering Foe around Susan Barton, a woman striving to narrate her own experience in a patriarchal and colonial literary world.
Susan’s relationship with Mr. Foe dramatizes the gendered nature of authorship. Her straightforward, unembellished story is dismissed as inadequate, while Foe’s desire to fictionalize her account reflects how women’s voices are shaped by male authority. Susan’s frustration mirrors the broader feminist struggle to assert authorship in a system that equates masculinity with creativity and credibility.
However, Susan’s role is also ambivalent. As a white woman, she holds a position of privilege in relation to Friday, yet she too experiences silencing. Her attempt to “speak for” Friday reproduces the same structures of domination she resists. Thus, Coetzee interweaves postcolonial and feminist critiques, revealing how both gender and race are inscribed within the politics of storytelling.
Postmodernism and the Collapse of Meaning
Foe employs postmodern strategies such as intertextuality, metafiction, and narrative ambiguity to destabilize the notion of truth inherited from Enlightenment realism. The novel constantly reminds readers of its own artifice, exposing how “history” is always a construct.
The final chapter (Chapter IV) exemplifies this postmodern rupture. Here, an unnamed narrator—possibly a symbolic reader—descends into a dreamlike underwater world, encountering the drowned bodies of Susan and others. When he opens Friday’s mouth, a stream of water flows out, representing a language beyond words.
This haunting image signifies the persistence of suppressed histories, flowing silently beneath the surface of written discourse. As López and Wiegandt (2016) argue, Coetzee uses intertextuality to engage with “non-English literary traditions” that have long been marginalized by Western canons. The water imagery suggests that meaning, though buried, continues to circulate — unreachable but not erased.
Conclusion: Rewriting the Silence
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe constructs the myth of the self-made man and the colonial master, celebrating human conquest over nature and other cultures. Coetzee’s Foe, on the other hand, dismantles this myth from within. By rewriting the canonical narrative through a postcolonial and feminist lens, Coetzee reveals how empire was built not only through guns and trade but through stories and silences.
In Foe, speech, silence, and authorship become metaphors for historical power relations—between colonizer and colonized, man and woman, writer and subject. The novel forces readers to confront an uncomfortable truth: that the very act of storytelling can perpetuate oppression.
Ultimately, Coetzee’s Foe is not just a response to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe but a redefinition of narrative itself a reminder that literature, like history, must continually reckon with the voices it has excluded.
References
- Caracciolo, Marco. “J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and the Embodiment of Meaning.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 36, no. 1, 2012, pp. 90–103.
- Coetzee, J. M. Foe. Vintage International, 1987.
- Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Ed. Michael Shinagel, W.W. Norton, 1994.
- López, María J., and Kai Wiegandt. “Introduction: J.M. Coetzee, Intertextuality and the Non-English Literary Traditions.” European Journal of English Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, 2016, pp. 113–126.
- Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s ‘Crusoe/Roxana.’” English in Africa, vol. 17, no. 2, 1990, pp. 1–23.
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