This document provides a summary of the novel "Waiting for the Barbarians" by John Maxwell Coetzee. It discusses the key themes of "We" and "Other" where the Empire sees itself as civilized ("We") and the barbarians as primitive ("Other"). It describes how the Magistrate's views change as he questions the Empire's treatment of the barbarians. The document also analyzes the concepts of borders, torture, and the ambiguity of identities under colonial rule as depicted in the novel.

1. Topic:- Concept of “We” and “Other” in
Waiting for the Barbarians”
“Now what’s going to happen to us without
barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution”
-Cavafy (1904)
Name :Khamal Krishna R.
Role no:-14
Std:M.A-2(SEM-4)
Paper no:-14
Enrollement no:20170014
Paper name:-The African Literature
Email id:-krishnakhamal01@gmail.com
Submitted to:- S.B Gardi Maharaja
Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.

2. Introduction about Author
 John Maxwell Coetzee
 He was novelist , translator , linguist
and recipient of the Nobel Prize in
Literature 2004.
 “Waiting for the Barbarian”1980
 It is one of the most important voices in post
colonial literature.
 It is describing of unnamed empire without
historical and geographical setting

3. We/Other
• Waiting for Barbarian is all about “We and
OTHER” WE (White)
OTHER(Black)

4. Empire
The Empire is abstract , timeless,
placeless, but through the scrim of
Empire.”Waiting for Barbarian” renders a
moment in our politics, a style of our
injustice.
Precisely this power of historical
immediacy gives the novel its thrust , its
larger and “Universal value”

5. Borders
• The Borders are defended and attacked ,
questioned and crossed , made to stand for
what is within and what is without.
• Border are the great demarcation of a fatal
dichotomy that has guided all of human
history , the differentiation of “US” and
“THEM”
• Bodies and Borders implay limitation ,
division and separation.

6. Magistrate’s View
• The Magistrate one among “We” criticizes the
way of investigation as he says.
“I ought never to
have taken my
lantern to see
what was going on
in the hut by the
granary”.

7. Dual Personality
• He thinks, “It has not escaped me
that an interrogator can
wear two masks, speak
with two voices, one
harsh , one seductive.”

8. Torture
• The nameless narrator has limited knowledge
about Imperial capital and Barbarians.
• Colonel Joll the representative of “WE”
Tortures the old man and the young boy who
are the representative of “OTHER”.
• Here we find torturing with girl and another
exmple

9. Barbarians are described as
Both desert nomads and settled farmers
Both herdsman and fisher people
Both peaceful and warlike
Both speaking known and unknown languages
Both pitiable and fearsome

10. Harmless Barbarians
• The magistrate believed
the Barbarian to be
harmless people who
wanted to re-establish
themselves as their land
was taken away.
• The people waited for
their attack but they
were not attacked.

11. Comparison
• Here we can compare the Barbarian
Girls muteness with Friday of the
novel Robinson Crusoe. And Friday of
the novel Foe.

12. The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse: Waiting for
the Barbarians in the Gaze of the Other
• J. M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians
colonial discourse. The binary constructs an
image of
• the civilized, rational and good, and the primitive,
irrational
• and evil on the opposite sides of a fixed border. In
this novel as well as in colonial reality, the binary
dissolves into ambivalence, overlap and often
complete inversion of the two op-
• posed constructed identities.
• ‘ We and other”

13. Difference
He differentiates the feelings of “We” and “Other”
“We”
• Think of the country here as
ours , part of our Empire.
our outpost. our
settlement, our market
center.
“Others”
• Thinks of us as visitors,
transients….outlast us. that
is what they are thinking .
That they will outlast us.

14. Expansion
• The novel is about such an empire that “must
expand, either by transforming the other,
wiping it from the face of the earth”.
• The novel deals with the nameless narrator
governing the nameless Empire.
• The “WE” AND “Other” complex among the
rules create crises in the Empire

15. Works Cited
Aničić , Andrijana. The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse: Waiting for.
Ed. Univerzitet Alfa. 19 May 2015. March 2018
<http://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/0350-0861/2015/0350-
08611502383A.pdf>.
Coetzee, Susan Van Zanten Gallagher and J. M. "TORTURE AND THE
NOVEL: waiting for the Barbarians." The University of Wincinsin press
journal division (1988): : http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208441.