Waiting for the Barbarians: An Immersion into the Dream World

In the novel Waiting for the Barbarians, dreams play a prime component in the deliverance of the narrator’s fears, hopes, and desires. We can observe such dreams through a Freudian lens, in an attempt to understand the repression of his staggering emotions.  Freud asserts that “ [dreams like literature] displace unconscious desires, drives and motives into imagery  that might bear no resemblance to its origin but that nonetheless permits it to achieve release or expression” (Rivkin 390). In the novel, the narrator, who presents himself to be the only person among other soldiers who demonstrates empathy for the imprisoned, finds himself trapped by his own inner consciousness. The manifest content behind some dreams demonstrates a sense of physical incompleteness and animalistic characteristics. The latent content, that information which is not directly revealed to the narrator, explores a possible meaning to the dreams and explores the metaphorical castration of a group of people referred to as the barbarians. The ideals behind that castration can be representative of the narrator’s repressed fears or anger for the injustices committed by the soldiers. There are various specific dream descriptions throughout the novel, but I will focus on just two.

                Time after time, the narrator dreams of snow and a young child whose face is not clearly shown. Such visions, which are manifested within his memory trouble him and cause him to continuously wake up every night. As the narrator vividly illustrates, “The face I see is blank, featureless; it is the face of an embryo or a tiny whale; it is not a face at all but another part of the human body that bulges under the skin” (42). Clearly, the narrator is troubled by this child he could not identify; the only aspect that can help him look at the child is replaced by a vision of emptiness and animalistic features that remove them farther away from “the normal” or the “accepted.” The narrator who is himself a magistrate, understands the power dynamics between himself, the soldiers and the most remote of civilizations in their eyes, the barbarians.  In this case, “normality” or “acceptance” is thus defined not by the fact that barbarians have arms, legs, and all other characteristics that are attributed to human beings, but by the savage like features that characterize them as the “other,” the not-nearly human savage.  In reference to his dream, not being able to identify the child might be a representation of his inability to understand the cruel doings of the soldiers who had violently attacked the prisoners. This notion of the “otherness,” ascribed to the barbarians feeds off of the idea that they are savages who do not even deserved to be recognized, as marked by the absence of the child’s face. After realizing that the beggared girl is a barbarian, who had been heavily attacked and who could very well be the face that is ascribed to the child in the narrator’s dreams, the narrator recognizes that she is a representation of the other who is trapped within the reigns of power.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/meyer769/myblog/2011/10/freuds-dream-protection-theory--what-is-the-meaning-of-our-dreams.html

                Another important dream was when the narrator describes, “There are other dreams in which the figure that I call the girl changes shape, sex, size. In one dream there are two shapes that arouse horror in me: massive and blank, they grow and grow till they fill all the space in which I sleep” (101). At this point in the story, the girl has returned with her group of people. The narrator, the magistrate is kept in poor conditions, becoming himself another prisoner. In order to be able to fully analyze the meaning of the dream, it is important to consider the state of mind and the physical conditions under which he is kept: a dark and isolated room with little to no access to clean water and food. He has attempted to forget the memory of the girl who was once her companion as a way to displace the hidden emotions he feels for her. Her image in his mind thus becomes distorted.  The two shapes mentioned also emphasize the power dynamics present in his inner conflict. What grows tremendously now that he has lived in the shoes of the prisoner, is his inner conflict: being the colonizer who must hold and keep power for the sake of his soldiers and to prevent him from being punished, and the colonizer who does not want to be colonizer based on the ideals of those governing around him. These anxieties are thus manifested in his dreams as blank and incomplete vision of the enemy.

Coetzee, J.M. Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: The Penguin Group, 1980. Print. 

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. “Introduction: Strangers to Ourselves: Psychoanalysis.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. Print.