Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Foe, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Storytelling and Power
Enslavement, Silence, and Erasure
Embellishment vs. Deception
Gender and Creation
Summary
Analysis
A narrator—is it Susan?—climbs a set of dark steps, perhaps the same steps that lead to Foe’s attic room. On the steps there is a girl with a scarf wrapped around her head. But when the narrator unwraps the scarf, she is frightened to realize that there is actually nothing underneath it.
The radical shift in perspective and tone is meant to disorient readers. For so long, Susan has been in control of the story, but now it is not clear who is narrating; stylistically, too, the writing begins to feel more contemporary and less mannered. The girl on the steps seems to be the young girl who claims to be Susan’s daughter—and her lack of substance suggests that the narrator does not see the girl as “a substantial being,” to use Susan’s phrase.
Themes
The narrator enters the room at the top of the steps and sees a woman and a man in bed. The narrator expects that the two figures might be decayed, but in fact, their bodies are perfectly preserved. The narrator then opens the curtain to the alcove and sees “the man Friday” stretched out on his back. Friday is breathing softly, and his teeth are clenched; the narrator pries a finger in his mouth in an attempt to separate his teeth. After a long time, Friday’s lips part—and “from his mouth, without a breath, issue the sounds of the island.”
Again, time is losing its shape and structure—the two figures in bed are clearly Susan and Mr. Foe, but the circumstances surrounding this scene remain hazy. Crucially, though, even in this funhouse version of Mr. Foe’s house, Friday’s speech is both elusive and necessary—only he, this section of the book seems to agree, can bear witness to the real “sounds of the island.”
Themes
The same scene happens again: a narrator climbs the stairs of a house, though this time, the house explicitly belongs to “Daniel Defoe, author.” The narrator again stumbles past the body, “light as straw,” of a young girl; again, the narrator sees a man and a woman in bed together. This time, the narrator observes there is a scar on Friday’s neck, “left by a rope or a chain.”
This circling, repetitive climbing of the steps is typical of postmodernism, which works to engage readers and break down their expectations for a linear narrative. The repeated motif ties back to the beginning of Part Three, when Susan climbs the stairs to greet Mr. Foe—so is Susan narrating? But if this narrator is Susan, why are they pointing out the scar on Friday’s neck? The scar is a clear acknowledgement of the violence of slavery (which Susan tries so hard to obscure).
Themes
The narrator finds the first few sentences of Susan Barton’s manuscript, which are familiar because those were the first couple sentences in the novel. But now, instead of going on to the island, the narrator ducks beneath the surface of the sea, where they are quickly covered in a mass of petals and where they see the wreck of Friday and Cruso’s ship. The narrator brushes past something soft, which could be a shark or a dead body.
Coetzee now makes literal the idea of going beneath a story’s surface. Unlike the manuscript Susan Barton left, this new narration is more interested in exploration, in diving deep. And of course, the thing literally beneath the surface here is the massive loss and death on the slave ship—symbolizing, perhaps, the inarticulable tragedy of slavery.
Themes
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Inside the ship, the narrator comes to the top of a staircase and opens the door; it is not the “country bath-house” that Susan had once imagined eternity to be. Inside, there is black water for ages, “the same water as yesterday, as last year, as three hundred years ago.” Susan Barton and the murdered captain are here, as is Friday. The narrator tries to speak to Friday, but underwater, speech is impossible.
Once again, this unnamed narrator shows traces of sharing Susan’s consciousness—one reading of this scene might be that Susan is in the afterlife and that the afterlife is the ocean. Even in eternity, monotony is inescapable, suggesting that Susan’s routine lives on both the island and in England are not the exception but the rule. And if Susan Barton is dead on the side of the ship, that suggests that this new narrator is a different—perhaps less literal—figure.
Themes
The narrator again tries to open Friday’s mouth so that he will speak. But instead of words, a “slow stream” comes out, pushing through the shipwreck and across all the cliffs and beaches of the island. The narrator, still unnamed, ends their tale by describing Friday’s stream: “soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face.”
In some ways, Friday’s story becomes like the ocean—vast, unknowable, and filled with both power and loss. Maybe this narrator is Coetzee or his readers or all of the generations that have followed Friday’s story, all of whom must feel the “beating” of the “unending” stories erased from colonial histories.
Themes
