Foe (1986) by J. M. Coetzee

This blog is based on foe by J.M.Coetzee and this task was assigned by Megha Trived9 ma'am.

  Comparative and Critical Analysis of Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe and

Foe (1986) by J. M. Coetzee

Introduction

The novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe is a foundational text of the English-novel tradition: a narrative of adventure, survival, providence and colonial enterprise. Meanwhile, J. M. Coetzee’s Foe is a sophisticated, post-colonial and metafictional reworking of that tradition. Coetzee doesn’t simply retell Defoe’s story; rather, he interrogates its assumptions, silences, and power-dynamics—and invites the reader to reconsider what the original has been telling us (and omitting). In this blog I will first summarise and analyse each work on its own terms, then engage in a comparative discussion—highlighting points of convergence and divergence, and reflecting on what the pairing of the two texts offers for literary, cultural and theoretical inquiry.

Part I: Robinson Crusoe – Key Features and Critical Issues

Summary in brief

In Robinson Crusoe, a young Englishman defies his father, goes to sea, is shipwrecked and eventually finds himself stranded alone on a tropical island for many years. He salvages goods, builds a shelter, domesticates animals, cultivates crops, rescues a native man he names “Friday”, and eventually is rescued himself and returns to civilization. The narrative is cast as Crusoe’s own first-person account of his fortunes, misfortunes, spiritual reflections and survival.

Major themes & interpretive lenses

1. Self-reliance, mastery and survival: Crusoe’s resourcefulness on the island — building, cultivating, planning, adapting — is often read as a celebration of individualism and human ingenuity. 

 Crusoe’s “mastery over nature” and the ambivalence of that mastery when applied to other humans (e.g., Friday). 

The ability to transform the island into a “home”, domesticated space underscores Enlightenment and colonial impulses of control and improvement.

2. Providence, repentance and religion: Crusoe treats his shipwreck and island-sojourn as having moral and divine significance. He sees his earlier disobedience (to his father, to his conscience) as part of a providential plan, and his isolation as a time for spiritual awakening. 

3. Colonialism, mastery and “Other”: One of the most powerful modern readings of the novel is its colonial dimension: Crusoe’s attitude toward the island, its resources, and Friday mirrors European colonial practices of ownership, labour, naming and conversion. For example, Crusoe names the island, declares dominion, teaches Friday English, converts him (in a sense) and uses him as labour. 

4. Isolation, society and identity: Crusoe’s solitude forces him to reconstruct society (he keeps “days”, journals, routines), to think about human society, civilization, and his own identity. While he is physically separated, he replicates the familiar social structures, property relations, and hierarchies. 

5. Narrative, economy and ideology: Crusoe’s salvaging, his calculation of goods and work, his domestication of the island, all lend themselves to reading the novel through economic metaphor (the “Crusoe economy” in economics). 

Critical issues

The “master vs servant” dynamic: While Crusoe triumphs over nature, his relationship with Friday complicates matters. Crusoe calls himself “master”, and the implications of cultural superiority become explicit. 

Ambiguity around “civilization” and “savagery”: Crusoe condemns the native practices he finds (e.g., cannibalism) and seeks to impose “civilisation”, yet the source and standard of that civilisation is implicitly European. 

Narrative reliability & genre: The work is cast as a realistic “true account”, but it is fictional. Its detailed island-chronicles invite questions about the genre of the novel, adventure literature, and colonial myth-making.

Relevance to colonial and post-colonial readings: Modern scholarship often interrogates how Crusoe anticipates European colonial attitudes—particularly notions of resource appropriation, naming, and otherness.

In short, Robinson Crusoe remains a fascinating object of study because it operates simultaneously as adventure, moral tale, economic metaphor, spiritual narrative and colonial allegory.

Part II: Foe – Key Features and Critical Issues

Summary in brief

In Foe, Coetzee re-imagines the castaway story of Crusoe by introducing a new narrator, Susan Barton, a shipwrecked Englishwoman who lands on the island where Cruso and Friday (renamed “Cruso” and “Friday” in Coetzee’s text) already live. After rescue and return to England, Susan attempts to tell her story and enlists a writer called “Mr Foe” to publish her account. The novel becomes a metafictional meditation on storytelling, voice, silencing, authorship, and the legacy of colonialism. The Black manservant Friday, whose tongue has been cut out, embodies the trauma of slavery and erasure. Susan’s narrative is troubled, the “author” Mr Foe has his own agenda, and the whole enterprise questions who gets to tell whose story. (See plot summary from LitCharts.) 

Major themes & interpretive lenses

1. Language, silence and voice: One of the central themes of Foe is the question of who has a voice, who is silenced, and how language functions as power. Friday’s mutilated tongue becomes a powerful symbol of colonial silencing. 

For example: “To tell my story and be silent on Friday’s tongue is … like a book for sale with pages in it quietly left empty.” (Susan Barton) 

Mr Foe remarks: “in every story there is a silence … we must make Friday’s silence speak.” 

2. Authorship, narration and meta-fiction: Coetzee plays with the idea of the author (Mr Foe), of Susan as narrator, and of the “original” Crusoe narrative. The novel troubles the idea that a story can unproblematically represent “reality”. It asks: Who owns the story? Who controls representation? What escapes language? 

3. Coloniality, enslavement and erasure: Foe faces directly the colonial underside of the Crusoe narrative. The reference to a slave-ship wreck, Friday’s tongue cut, Cruso’s doubtful past, all point to histories of slavery, exploitation and silenced subjectivity. 

4. The limitations of narrative and truth: Susan’s narrative is revealed to be incomplete, faulty, and constrained by her own perspective. The novel emphasises multiple levels of uncertainty: the truth of Friday’s past, the reliability of the narrator, the possibility of an “authentic” story. This aligns with post-modern concerns about narrative, and post-colonial critique about whose narrative counts. 

5. Primitivism and the myth of the “island”: Whereas Robinson Crusoe often presents the island as a site of adventure, mastery and eventual uplift, Foe undercuts the mythic romance of the deserted island. In Foe, the island is bleak, monotonous; the building of walls is purposeless; the human predicament is more ambiguous. 

Critical issues

Representation of the silenced subject: Friday is central, yet literally silent. His very silence demands that we think about what is left out of dominant narratives. The novel invites us to consider how colonial literature has erased or distorted other voices.

Gender and voice: Susan Barton, as a woman narrator in a male-dominated castaway tradition, is both inside and outside the tradition: she seeks voice, yet is marginalised. Her struggle resonates with feminist critique as well as post-colonial.

Interrogation of the literary canon: By reworking Crusoe, Coetzee challenges the canonical status of Defoe’s text: its assumptions, its foundations, its omissions. The novel asks the reader to reconsider the “classic.”

Hybrid genre and unresolved ending: The final section of Foe is dream-like, ambiguous, unsettling: the reader is left with more questions than answers. What can we know? What cannot be told? This lack of closure is integral to the novel’s effect.

In sum, Foe is not simply a retelling—it is an act of interrogation. It uses the familiar structure of the castaway narrative to expose its ideological underpinnings.

Part III: Comparative Discussion

1. Narrative structure & voice

In Robinson Crusoe we have a first-person castaway narrative: Crusoe himself recounts his story, emphasising his survival, his providential reflection, his mastery. The narrative is linear, confident, dominating.

In Foe we have a fractured, multi-layered narrative: Susan Barton’s letters, the presence of Mr Foe as a writer figure, Friday’s silent presence, the final unnamed narrator. The narrative questions itself.

The difference in narrative ambition is significant: where Defoe offers a story of mastery, Coetzee offers a story of disruption.

2. Treatment of the island and nature

Defoe’s island, while challenging, is the scene of Crusoe’s enterprise, his creation of order, his self-improvement. The natural world is something to be mastered, domesticated, improved.

In Coetzee’s version, the island is less romantic: it is lonely, repetitious, the terrace-building is meaningless; the wind howls; Susan is disquieted; the island becomes a metaphor for existential and historical stasis rather than triumph. 

Thus the same setting is used to opposite effect: one celebrates mastery, the other questions the very idea of mastery.

3. Representation of “Friday” / the “Other”

In Crusoe, Friday is rescued from cannibals; becomes Crusoe’s companion; is taught English; is assimilated into Crusoe’s world. Yet Crusoe retains his superiority: he names Friday, defines him, teaches him. 

In Foe, Friday is a black man whose tongue has been cut. His voice is literally removed. He is never fully represented in Susan’s narrative. His past is uncertain; his subjectivity is hidden. Susan projects on him; Mr Foe asks for Friday’s own story. 

The contrast is clear: Crusoe’s Friday is assimilated, domesticated, spoken for; Coetzee’s Friday is silenced, marginalised, whose inner life eludes capture.

This invites us to ask: Whose story is being told? Who gets the voice? Who remains “Other”? Coetzee’s text foregrounds these questions.

4. Authorship, power and colonial critique

Defoe’s text embodies early-eighteenth-century colonial and Protestant values: the idea of providence, work, individualism, conversion, the civilising mission. The colonial gaze tends to go unquestioned.

Coetzee’s text turns that gaze back on itself: it exposes the colonial assumptions, the erasures, the power of narrative to define and exclude. For example, Foe interrogates the authorial status of “Mr Foe/Defoe” and shows how Susan’s story is mediated, distorted, re-presented. 

In this way, Foe acts as a post-colonial corrective (though one that remains self-aware)—not simply by rewriting the story, but by showing how the original story worked to silence certain voices.

5. Themes of voice, silence and representation

While Robinson Crusoe emphasises speaking out (Crusoe keeps diaries, journals, speaks to God, names things) and the mastery of environment and destiny, Foe emphasises the limits of speech, the silences, the gaps.

The motif of Friday’s tongue, the motif of Susan’s difficulty in telling the story, the unreliability of narratives—they all converge to show how representation is bound up with power.

As one critic puts it: “Friday’s enforced silence represents what a monocultural, metropolitan discourse cannot hear.” 

6. Ideological and historical implications

Robinson Crusoe can be read as a product (and promoter) of its era: colonial expansion, mercantilism, self-improvement, Protestant providence. Its optimism, its individualistic ethos reflect that cultural moment.

Foe emerges from a later moment—post-colonial awareness, metafictional scepticism, an understanding of how empire and narrative intersect. It is not simply a mirror-image, but a critique and transformation of the earlier text.

Therefore, reading the two texts together allows us to see how literary traditions evolve, how historical consciousness changes, and how canonical texts may be re-examined.

Part IV: Implications for Literary Study and Reflection

1. Re-reading the canon: The pair invites us to ask: When we teach or read Robinson Crusoe, what do we emphasise? Adventure? Providence? Or do we also ask with equal weight: What about the colonial logic? What about Friday’s representation? Foe reminds us to do the latter.

2. Voice and silencing: In any literary work (especially with imperial/colonial context) we must ask: Who speaks? Who is spoken for? Who is silent? Who is omitted? Foe dramatizes these questions in a way that invites reflexivity.

3. Genre and story-telling: The castaway narrative is one of the oldest adventure tropes. Both works show the power of that trope: how it can be a celebration of human resourcefulness, but also how it can mask deeper issues of power, ownership, naming, voice.

4. Historical consciousness: For students of literature, the pairing highlights how texts are embedded in historical ideologies. The eighteenth-century mindset of Defoe is not the same as the late twentieth-century mindset of Coetzee. Recognising this doesn’t diminish the earlier work, but deepens our understanding of its context.

5. Critical pedagogy: In teaching, one could present Crusoe first, then Foe as a response or critique. This method fosters critical thinking: rather than assuming the first narrative as “given”, students can interrogate it, compare it, critique it.

Conclusion

The comparison of Robinson Crusoe and Foe is richly rewarding. On the one hand, Defoe’s work remains an ingenious, influential narrative: adventure, survival, providence, individualism, colonial enterprise. On the other hand, Coetzee’s Foe brings a profound questioning to that tradition: about voice, representation, colonial power, narrative authority and silencing.

Reading them side-by-side, we move from the comfortable certainties of eighteenth-century castaway romance to the more uneasy questions of modern post-colonial literature: Who gets to tell the story? What is being left out? What kind of “freedom” is this when one man names another, converts him, teaches him English, calls himself “master”? And what happens when the silenced one tries to speak—or cannot?

In academic terms, this pairing works at multiple levels: thematic, structural, ideological. For example:

Thematic: survival ↔ silencing; mastery ↔ power; voice ↔ absence.

Structural: first-person castaway narrative ↔ metafictional, multi-voiced narrative.

Ideological: colonial optimism ↔ post-colonial critique.

For those studying literature at the Master’s level (as yourself), this comparison allows for rich essays and seminar discussions. Possible essay topics include:

“The role of language and silence in Foe as counter-narrative to Crusoe.”

“Colonial mastery and its discontents: how Crusoe normalises dominion, while Foe problematises it.”

“Narrative authority and authorship: from Crusoe’s journal to Susan Barton’s letters and Mr Foe’s manuscript.”

“The island as metaphor: from site of triumph in Crusoe to site of stasis and silenced history in Foe.”

Ultimately, Foe does not simply replace Crusoe, but honours the fact of its existence by rewriting it, challenging it, and thus enriching our understanding of both texts.

Thank You !