Foe

Foe is the fifth novel by the South African writer J. M. Coetzee, published in 1986, and one of his most characteristic postmodern texts. The "Foe" in the title is a play on the first half of the surname Defoe (Daniel Defoe), and the book stands in strong intertextual relation to Robinson Crusoe. The novel unfolds in the voice of the female narrator Susan Barton: she travels from England to Brazil in search of her abducted daughter, is shipwrecked on the return voyage, and is cast onto a desert island, where she meets the Englishman Cruso and his Black servant Friday, whose tongue has been cut out. Life on the island is monotonous and barren—Cruso insists on building useless terraced stone walls and has no interest in being rescued and returning home, while Friday remains silent throughout. Cruso dies on the voyage back to England, and Susan returns to London with Friday; in poverty, she finds the writer Foe and asks him to write her island experience truthfully as a book. Foe, however, brutally cuts and reorganizes the experience, and Susan argues with him repeatedly to reclaim the right to narrate her own story; meanwhile, a stranger claiming to be her daughter appears, casting doubt on the truth of everything she has told. The novel is divided into four parts: the first two are presented in epistolary form enclosed in quotation marks, the third is a direct confrontation between Susan and Foe, and the fourth abruptly shifts into a dreamlike passage without quotation marks and with an unknown narrator. Through this, Coetzee asks: who has the right to tell a story? How are the voices erased from historical writing—women, the colonized—to be accommodated? Friday's silence becomes the book's most powerful metaphor. At about ninety thousand characters, the book is not long, yet it is layered and multifaceted, read both as an allegory of the South African situation and as an important text of feminist and postcolonial criticism.