Assignment
Name: Maheta
Arati R.
Class: M.A.-2
Semester: 4th
Roll No: 2
Paper: 14 The African Literature
Topic: Themes,
motifs and symbols in Waiting for the Barbarians.
Guided by: Dr. Dilip
Barad
Batch: 2013-15
Year: 2014-15
Some important things about Writer and Book
He was born on 9 February 1940.he is
Novelist, essayist, literary critic, linguist and also translator. He got
Booker prize in 1983 & 1995 and Prix Femina Etranger in 1985 and Nobel
Prize in Literature in 2003.
Waiting
for the Barbarians is a novel by South African writer J.M. Coetzee. Story of the book is narrated in the First
person by unnamed magistrate of small colonial town that exist as the
territorial frontier of the empire. The Magistrate’s rather peaceful existence
comes to an end with the Empire’s declaration of a State of emergency and with
the Deployment of the 3rd Bureau Special force of the empire due to rumors that the area’s residential people who called according to them ‘’
barbarians’’ by the colonists might be preparing to attack the town so Sinister
Colonel Joll who was like leader and so Third Bureau captures some Barbarians,
then they brings them back to town and they torture them, kills some of them
and then leaves for the capital in order to prepare a large campaign.
At that time
the Magistrate questioned the legitimacy of imperialism and he personally
nurses a barbarian girls. She was left crippled and partly blinded by the Third
Bureau’s torture. Magistrate has an intimate although uncertain relation ship
with that barbarian girl. Then Magistrate decides to take that girl to her
people. After a dangerous trip through the
barren land, during which they have sex, and finally he succeed in returning to
her then he finally asking her to stay with him and he returned to his own
town. Then other soldier comes to know about him and they punished him and
story goes on
Themes
The theme of a story is what the
author is trying to convey, in other words, the central idea of the story.
Short stories often have just one theme, whereas novels usually have multiple
themes.
Themes in waiting for the Barbarians.
Dream: ‘’ From horizon to horizon the earth is white
with snow. It falls from sky in which the source of light is diffuse and
everywhere present, as though the sun has dissolved into mist become an aura.
In the dream I pass the barracks gate, pass the bare flagpole. The square
extends before me. Blending at its edges into the luminous sky. Walls trees,
houses have dwindled lost their solidity, retired over the rim of the world.’’
-The Magistrate’s dream
An
exploration of an idea of barbarism:
When
we see or read poem by Cavafy we come to know about the poem that the poem is explores
the necessity of the “other” to the function and exercise of imperial power. In
it a town awaits the arrival of the barbarians, and in its final lines the
people are not unsettled by the barbarians’ arrival, but another menace:
Because
night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And
some people arrived from the borders,
and
said that there are no longer any barbarians.
And
now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those
people were some kind of solution.
Coetzee uses his great skill to
underline the irony in these final lines. The barbarians those menaces the
towns are never seen, the “absurd prisoners” brought back by the Third Bureau
are abject and ridiculous. We are never brought face to face with the enemy,
who is able to evade the Empire’s reach. The people’s need for the barbarian is
palpable. It culminates in the frenzied scene in which the people step forward
from the crowd to partake in the punishment and humiliation of the barbarian
men. The actual prisoners never do correspond to the imagined menace, though
this menace is real enough by the novel’s end. Together the Empire and the
people have created a barbarian that is a real enough threat to the town’s
survival, but this enemy evades even Coetzee’s reach and can never be pinned
down.
Theme of Colonialism: we can see theme of
colonialism in this novel that how the people of empire torture to the people
who were the actually owner of the land who were barbarians according to the
Third bureau. And so it becomes most important theme in this novel.
Power: We
can see the themes like Power in this novel because when we read the novel we
get sympathy with the people who were barbarians according to other people who
ruled over them the people were tortured and killed by the empire’s people the
third bureau were wants to ruled over the people and they wants to control
The Magistrate has power over the
soldiers and civilians, and the Colonel has power over the Magistrate, as with
any hierarchy. In this story, power is authority, maybe granted by a higher
authority figure, but also a subconscious power, like the girl has over the
Magistrate.
Torture: torture was used on the “barbarians and also on the Magistrate. But the Empire
did not even know who was who where the frontier was concerned. Colonel Joll
interrogated the old man and his grandson in the beginning of the book using
torture. Then he captured barbarians who were really just fishermen and nomads.
He claims to have gained useful information on the dangerous barbarians using
these techniques, and that the people he captured admitted to being barbarians
and gave up info on their people. The last group of prisoners in the book, it
was not even clear if these people were barbarian. Or not?
Motifs in the Novel
What is meaning
of the Motif?
The literary device ‘motif’ is any
element, subject, idea or concept that is constantly present through the entire
body of literature. Using a motif refers to the repetition of a specific theme
dominating the literary work. Motifs are very noticeable and play a significant
role in defining the nature of the story, the course of events and the very
fabric of the literary piece.
This novel is rich in symbol and meaning.
Among them the movement of the seasons, the time of nature, set in pointed
opposition to the time of human history. The novel begins in late summer, at a
time of harvest and bounty and ends at the verge of winter, and the end of
civilization as known by the town’s inhabitants. Even in the very beginning the
oblivion that threatens is introduced in a dream motif, which anticipates the
novels final pages as well as the barbarian girl. in striking contrast to the
Magistrates unsparing and wry narrative, the dreams are the novel’s most
stunning prose, recreating with authenticity the language and sublime images of
a sleeping but lucid mind, and evoking both primal terror and pleasure
We can see that in a recurring
dream the Magistrate enters the town square in winter, where a kneeling girl,
her face obscured, is working on a snow castle. Sitting with other children,
they melt away upon the Magistrates approach. Unable to see her or even imagine
her face, she is a living contrast to the stark white austerity of the empty
square.
It is also in an empty square
that the Magistrate first encounters the kneeling barbarian girl, the north
wind bringing with it the first hint of winter. The dream motif weaves its way
through the Magistrates narrative. In it the snow blankets the familiar world
like a shroud, containing just the smallest hint of a latent fertility.
Struggling to glimpse the face beneath the hood he encounters instead the face
of an embryo or tiny whale, as white as the snow itself.
We
can see when we read the novels that As the dream progresses he is disturbed to
find the fort or square the girl is building is empty of life, only the girl,
who he glimpses in a moment of clarity, relieves the dream of its desolation.
In his brief glimpse of her face her eyes shine and she smiles. The dream
sharpens in the next sequence and he sees her clearly, a gold thread woven through
her hair, wearing a blue robe, the snow castle transformed into a clay oven.
The girl is baking live-giving bread, but the dream ends before the Magistrate
can accept or taste it, and his is never able to renter the dream at this
point. Instead, the final winter dream is a mere collision with the girl, which
echoes his collision with a woman in the night; his clarity has already begun
to fade. In the novel’s final paragraph the dream and its insights have been
wholly effaced by the reality of winter, it is not a dream but real children,
building a snowman as they await their destiny, who have replaced the girl and
the enigma she represents.
Symbols
Symbol is an object that
represents, stands for or suggests an idea, visual image, belief or material
entity. Symbols take the form of words, sounds, gesture or visual images and
are used to convey idea and beliefs.
The empire: The
empires represent power that doesn't require that
Those who serve it love
others but merely perform duties.
Barbarians Tribes:
According to rumors barbarian tribes have been arming and the empire would have
to employ measures to prevent war.
Square: the
square can be seen from the Magistrate’s window. And he can see prisoners
arriving from there
Third Bureau:
The third Bureau is described as an unsleeping guardian of the Empire being an
investigative agency.
So there are many things by which we can say that this novel is full of themes, and symbols
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