Waiting for the Barbarians

Abstract

This paper puts into analysis the identity of the Magistrate in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians from a

post-modern perspective. It warns against the terror of colonialism that yields unstable and confused identities

such as that of the Magistrate. As the Magistrate spends a long time in the service of the Empire in the colony, his

mode of thinking about colonization gets changed especially with the coming of the military Colonel Joll, who

represents the aggression and violence of the colonizer. Living in such kind of conflict between his identification

with the colonized and his loyalty to the Empire, the Magistrate’s self gets divided and fragmented. Alienation,

lack of cultural belonging, and fragmentation are among the post-modern themes this paper analyzes in relation

to the Magistrate’s identity. Loss and vagueness are anticipated by the Magistrate to identify the colonial figure

in an atmosphere of mess and chaos.

Key Words: Postmodernism, colonial identity, fragmentation, hyper-reality, assimilation, conflict, power

relations.

This article is ultimately dedicated to investigating the Magistrate as a post-modern identity living in a colonial

context. The Magistrate establishes his identity in the novel as an intermediary figure between two opposing

polemics: the colonizer and the colonized. Though he works for the colonizers and carries out their colonial duties

in the unnamed colony, the Magistrate inconsistently appears sympathetic with the natives whom the colonizers

usually describe as barbarian. His identity is trapped by colonialism, and he is not sure what to do. All of what he

wants is to retire and finish his business there in peace resorting to nonviolence of any kind against the natives of

the land. The Magistrate spends around thirty years in the colony, so that he himself achieves a sort of

identification with the colonized. He becomes aware of the injustice of colonization and rejects it at the end as he...