Foe by J. M. Coetzee
Different authors employ different styles in storytelling. The choice of a given storytelling technique is crucial as it not only define the author but also determines the connections that the reader has to draw to understand the message. It also determines the connection between the scenes and the different characters. Coetzee employs a unique storytelling technique. The style employed only allows the reader to connect the various aspects of the story by heavily drawing from the instances from the previous scenes (Caracciolo 91). Notably, the last chapter of the story depicts this unique storytelling technique. He also uses fiction in narrating the story. Additionally, the novel employs a form of investigative story telling technique whereby the narrator accompanies the reader into an enigmatic story world. The last chapter forms of the novel forms the basis of the unique features of the storytelling technique employed by Coetzee in the novel.
Coetzee uses fiction in narrating the story in the Foe. This leaves the reader free to implement a mimetic reading strategy. One of the chapters that depict mush of this style is Chapter IV. It confounds the reader by distorting the flow of the ideas as well as the activities into some form of a dream world, which is riddled with not only indeterminacies but also contradictions. The culmination of the style is in the five last pages of the novel. They leave the reader with a feeling that the author left much of the story untold or rather a feeling that there is some mystery that has to be solved (Caracciolo 92). One of the aspects that the reader notices is the contradictory nature of the of the chapter which he/she has to use to find its meaning as Dolezel suggests. He notes that it is not an ordinary fictional world:
Coetzee’s radical fiction making proceeds beyond ontological contradictions of metafiction to logical contradictions of an impossible world: Friday is alive/Friday is dead Susan lies dead in Foe’s bed/Susan floats dead in the ship wreck (221).
In the novel, the reader is able to denote that Friday, the black slave of Dofoe’s novel, is unable to speak since he lost his tongue. Although condemned into speechlessness in the novel, he seems to a say. Dolezel centered on his reading in the last chapter that “Friday is a possible author, but in an impossible world, in a world whose signs do not signify, whose stories are full of contradictions, whose authors give up authority” (221-222). Although the interpretation given by Dolezel seemingly makes sense, the reader might not be able to out rightly get the answers that the chapter raises. An example of the aspects that remain unanswered is the identity of the first person narrator. Dolezel asserts that the anonymous narrator is “obviously a fictional counterpart of the actual author” (221).
The narrative pattern employed by the author especially in the last chapter enables the reader to recognize the fictional elements or rather existents form the previous parts of the novel. An overview of about ‘climbing the staircase’ will enhance a better understanding of this aspect. In the first two pages of the conclusion of the Foe, the character-narrator embarks on climbing a staircase the lack of light causes her to stumble over a dead body. She then finds herself in some dark room. In this particular room, she discovers that she two more corpses lying side by side in bed. She is able to recognize Friday who is still alive. She slowly leans on Friday and opens his mouth to listen to the “sounds of the island” ensuing form his mouth. The author uses two-spaced asterisks to separate this scene from the next. However, the next part seems to be replay of the previous scene only that this time the narrator, stands outside the house before starting to climb the stairs. What follows has some minimal changes compared to the previous scene. For instance, it is day time and Friday has already moved and there are some slight differences in the wording up to the point where the narrator opens Friday’s mouth (from the previous scene). The totally new aspect in this scene is the dispatch box. As soon as the narrator reads it, she is transported to the middle of the sea. Unlike the previous transition, it is clear and no astericks are involved. Finding herself in the midst of seaweed, the narrator dives underwater where she discovers a wreck of a ship. After climbing the staircase, she finds herself inside the cabin where she finds dead bodies of “Susan Barton and her dead captain”. This is the first instance where the dead bodies are named. Friday is also in the ship lying in a corner. In this case, the narrator does not move to Friday and open his mouth. On the contrary, he opens his mouth and emits a stream that flows in all directions, “to the end of the earth” (157).
The above discussion highlights the series of events or rather the structuring of the narrative and how it brings about fiction. The narrator enters into an enclosed environment, climbs some stairs, stumbles of a body that leads her to the discovery of more bodies within the enclosure and Friday, still alive. The narrator in this scene, Susan Barton, is the female castaway as well as the teller of the story in the first part of the first chapter which is in quotation marks.
The narrator tells the story in the a manner that enables the reader to connect various aspects in the story. For instance, one is able to note that the house in which the narrator enters in the first two scenes in the last chapter is Foe’s house. This is signaled by the repetition of nearly the same words from the beginning of the chapter as well as the previous one. The words are “The staircase was dark and mean” (113) are used to describe the staircase in Chapter III where the narrator, Susan ascends the stairs to Foe’s house. The same words have been repeated in chapter four (153). The copses mentioned in the first scene of this chapter are lying in bed an aspect that reminds the reader of the instance in Chapter III where Susan was getting into Foe’s bed: “For a while we lay in silence, Foe on his side, I on mine,’ Susan said” (137). Therefore, by connecting the events in the previous chapters and scenes, the reader is able to conclude that house is unmistakably Foe’s.
The identification of the bodies, which the narrator stumbles over, can be identified by back tracking the events in the previous chapters. The first body must belong to the mysterious girl who kept following the narrator claiming to be her long lost daughter. In the last chapter, the author notes that the first body that the narrator stumbles over was of “a woman or of a girl” and that “ her limbs are unnaturally short” (153). He also adds that she was wearing a “long grey dress” (Ibid). This takes the reader back to the previous scene where Susan first saw the girl. During that first instance, as mentioned in Chapter II, she wore a “grey cloak and cape” (72).
The storytelling nature of the novel is done in a manner, which suggests that the author seemingly holds a mirror up to the reader’s attempts at making sense of all they have learned from the novel. One can therefore conclude that the anonymous ultimate narrator employed in the novel is a fictional stand-in for the reader (Caracciolo 99). One has to connect the previous happenings in the story to come to this reality because the narrating voice in the last chapter seems totally new to the reader. As aforementioned, Susan Barton narrates the previous chapters of the novel. In the last chapter, Susan is referred to as a third person. For instance, when she opened Friday’s mouth, the narrator in question begins “to hear the faintest faraway roar: as she said, the roar of waves in a shell” (154). The ‘she’ the narrator refers to in this context was no doubt that it was Susan. This is because before this incident she had proposed to Foe that “It is for us to open Friday’s mouth and hear what it holds: silence, perhaps, or a roar, like the roar of a seashell held to the ear” (142). This shows that someone else, other than Susan, was narrating the story. The author also provides evidence about the narrator in the last chapter being a fictional counterpart of the reader.
Drawing from the use of ‘she’ in the above quoted text, one could ask himself why the narrator would take Susan’s identity for granted. One of the most probable explanations is that the reader already has bits of the previous scenes in the story-as if he/she had already finished reading the novel and is already looking for its meaning. In another instance, the narrator notes that, “The sand under my hands is soft, dark.it is like the mud of Flanders in which generations of grenadiers now lie dead, trampled in the postures of sleep” (156). In the previous scenes, Susan has speculations of the grenadiers used in Foe’s stories (52, 53, 51). Susan expresses her fear that she and Friday could be abandoned by Foe. She mentioned “his grenadiers fall into an enchanted sleep whenever he absents himself” (66). With this in mind, it is easier for the reader to relate the two statements. It is undoubtedly that the use of the grenadiers and the description that the reader draws from the past chapters provides a connection between the narrator of the chapter and the reader of the novel.
The story telling technique employed in the novel enables the reader understand the events of the novel by drawing from previous scenes. For instance, in the identification of the dead bodies in the ship a as well as in the house, the reader has to recall or even go back to the relations that were established in the previous scenes. The same applies in the identification of the house where the narrator enters after climbing the stairs. The technique also shows some of the unique literary techniques used by the author namely repetition which also played a pivotal role in identifying the owner of the house. The author was also able to narrate the story in manner that depicts the reader as a fictional narrator as discussed above.
Works Cited
Caracciolo, Marco. “J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and the Embodiment of Meaning.” Journal of Modern
Literature 36.1 (2010): 91-106. Print.
