Teaching Waiting for the Barbarians as a Post-Colonial Text

• Main Authors: Chen Chin-cheng, 陳金城
• Other Authors: Chen Ching-chi
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2002
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/06977439954461243709

碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 90 === J. M. Coetzee’s novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, is especially illuminating to our understanding of the world we live in and the long history of dominance and liberation. The plot of the novel is deceptively simple and the characterization may not be satisfactory if we compare the novel to world classics. However, the apparently simple novel is a thought-provoking allegory that calls our attention to the traumatic inflictions on both the oppressors and the oppressed. It is aimed at revealing the fact that the beast within is even more appalling than the barbarians without. If we do not know how to tame the beast within, we may reduce ourselves to monomaniac henchmen of hegemonic power, which is always open to challenge and may be subverted. In teaching and reading the novel Waiting for the Barbarians as a post-colonial text, we are offered the chance to understand the key issues of post-colonial studies. Despite the difficulty to define the portmanteau term Post-colonialism, we may find that its quintessence lies in the goal of transcending the rhetoric of blame and rise from the history of domination toward the actuality of liberation. In our present world of neo-colonialism disguised as globalization, the post-colonial issues are pertinent to our awareness of domination. Embedded in such awareness is the more significant hope for authentic liberation and freedom from being subordinated. When we apply the post-colonial theories to our understanding of the novel Waiting for the Barbarians, it becomes apparent that Coetzee makes great efforts to lay bare the contrast between civilization and barbarism, between the powerful and the powerless. By means of the Magistrate’s narrative of what has happened to him, Coetzee endeavors to expose the absurdity of such demarcations. More importantly, the novel itself is an effort to de-scribe Empire, which is an allegorical symbol of all forms of imperialism.