J.M. Coetzee’s Foe: Quarreling with the (UN)Truth

The pen and the written word become powerful tools in the transgression of occurrences in  J.M. Coetzee’s novel,  Foe. The reader traces the narrator, Susan Barton’s, path and the manipulation, or lack thereof, of her own story through the four part structure of the novel. At the beginning of the novel, Barton has authority over the detailing of her story. Barton, who remains unnamed in the first part of the novel, identifies herself as a castaway who makes a personal connection with two other characters, Cruso and Friday, whom she describes as, “an imbecile incapable of speech” (22).  At this point, the reader is able to sympathize with the Barton, the desolate woman who was stranded on an island with two strange men and with little means of survival. As we, the reader, move forward in the novel, however, we begin to question the purpose and true meaning behind the way Barton relates her story. Thus, it is in the second and third part of the novel that we begin to question not only the credibility of Barton’s story, but also her identity and her sanity. 

The second section begins with journal entries directed to Mr. Foe, an author she wishes to share her story with. She asserts that she will reside in his home. This is where the story becomes multifaceted in the sense that many of the details mentioned in the first part begin to be questioned. The first question that came to mind as I began to read this section was, how is it that Mr. Foe opens his doors to a castaway woman and another man we can assume he knows little about? All we know is that he is an author who will lavish Barton’s story with detail. Her connection with Mr. Foe also opens up many aspects about Barton’s identity, especially because he is the only person who she can communicate with since her return. This closeness, even if at this point is through writing, reveals important aspects about Barton. Barton, in this section, is confronted with two young women. She finds the first girl outside of Mr. Foe’s apartment, standing still as if she was hypnotized by Barton’s close proximity. Oddly enough, the girl claims to also be named Susan Barton’s, and argues that she is Barton, the narrator’s, long lost daughter. Also, later on in this section, we also become aware of the baby’s bloody corpse whom Barton interestingly identifies, “Who was the child but I, in another life” (105). The questions that thus develop are: is the existence of the two children an uncanny form of repressing the loss of her child, the one she claims to have lost? Or, is the existence of these two children just a form of “spicing” up her story?  Attempting to answer these questions can be a bit complex, especially because she is the only person who can really say if what happened in the stranded island really did occur, especially since Friday was not able to communicate this information. Only she can provide the reader an insight into her past, so the reader must depend only on her account and her lens to investigate her story.

It is in the third section of the story that she begins to add and subtract pieces of her story, claiming that they are pieces of information she has not revealed to anyone. Barton states, “I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire” (131). Is her desire thus to embellish her story so that it fits Mr. Foe’s literary parameters. Though time after time she indicates that she does not want anything that will change her plot and the credibility of her story, Mr. Foe remains persistent with this idea. The reader must then question the validity of her statements. Moreover, so many ideas are playing in her head, that she appears at one point to be questioning her beliefs and ideas. Barton states, “Nothing is left to me but doubt. I am doubt itself. Who is speaking me? Am I a phantom too? To what order do I belong? And you: who are you?” (133). “Truth,” thus becomes just a subjective term that seems farther away from Barton’s story. As far as the reader knows, the story could have been all fragments of Barton’s imagination from the very beginning. Is it reasonable then to have reservations about Barton’s sanity? Barton later explains, “We, or some of us: it is possible that some of us are not written, but merely are; or else (I think principally of Friday) are written by another and darker author” (143). Who is this other entity she is once again referring to, this “darker author”?  To answer this question and the questions previously asked, we can then look at Barton’s detailing as a hyper-narrative (a non-linear, multidimensional structure) of her own imaginative truth, that is to say the author she fears to be, one that will cast a shadow, a dark ghostly shadow of the truth.