The document summarizes key aspects of J.M. Coetzee's novel "Waiting for the Barbarians". It discusses how the magistrate sees the self and other as inseparable and interdependent. It also analyzes how the magistrate and the third bureau try to understand the enigmatic barbarian girl, but find her indecipherable. The empire projects its own barbarism onto those beyond its borders.

1. “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.”
- Cavafy (1904)
Maulik Bhadreshkumar Bhatt,
M.A. Part – II, Sem – IV,
Roll No - 03
Paper – E-E-405-D- The African Literature,
Unit – 03 – Waiting for the Barbarians,
Department of English,
Bhavnagar University.
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2.  Self – Other Binary
 Magistrate / Colonel Joll
 Excavation of the nearby ruin of a former civilization
 Enigmatic washing and oiling “ritual” with a naked barbarian girl
 Alterity is Inter-subjective for him
 Self and other – inseparable – if distinct
Mikhail Bakhtin‟s view – self-other interdependence and interanimation
“I am conscious of myself only while revealing myself to another, through another, and
with the help of another… A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and
always on the boundary; looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with
the eyes of another… I cannot manage without another, I cannot become myself without
another; I must find myself in another by finding another in myself” (Shaffer, 134)
 Mutual reflection and mutual acceptance
 In order to understand – Locate outside – time, space and culture
 Life is Dialogical – to dialogue/commune
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3.  Magistrate‟s relationship with a Barbarian Girl linked with that of Third Bureau‟s.
 Both trying to „trespass into the forbidden‟
 Girl – Indecipherable – unreadable – obscure – opaque – blank – incomplete
“There is only blankness and desolation that that there has to be such blankness”
(Coetzee, 79)
 Magistrate – A man who has lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may
lead nowhere.
Anatomizes the difficulty faced by even the most well-intentioned Self in in
understanding and valuing the other
The empire projects its own barbarism onto the other beyond the borders
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4. References:
Cavafy, Constantine P. Waiting for the Barbarians, 1904, Print.
Coetzee, J.M., Waiting for the Barbarians, 79. 1980, Print.
Shaffer, W. Brian., Reading the Novel in English, 121-137, 2006, Print.
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