The desert island is the literal setting for much of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Foe, but the idea of islands also symbolizes the difficulty of communication. Despite being more social on the island than she is at any other time in the story, protagonist Susan Barton almost never uses language there, as one of her companions (Friday) has lost his tongue, while the other (Cruso) sees little need for words (either spoken or written). But when Susan returns to England, living with Friday in Mr. Foe’s house, communicating with others does not get any easier. Instead, she marvels that her life in London is just as silent and isolated as her time on the island, and she imagines that Mr. Foe, in hiding and alone, must be feeling similarly. “The world is full of islands,” Susan reflects; over the course of the novel, she comes to realize that those who are arrested, shunned, or even just separated from their loved ones can feel like “castaways in the very heart of the city.” Thus, islands come to represent the way that humans can be lonely even in—or sometimes especially in—a dense city or a closely packed home.
Islands Quotes in Foe
One day [Cruso] would say his father had been a wealthy merchant whose counting-house he had quit in search of adventure. But the next day he would tell me he had been a poor lad of no family who had shipped as a cabin boy and been captured by the Moors (he bore a scar on his arm which was, he said, the mark of the branding iron) and escaped and made his way to the new world. Sometimes he would say he had dwelt on his island in the past 15 years, he and Friday, none but they having been spared when their ship went down. […] Yet at other times, as for instance when he was in the grip of the fever…he would tell stories of cannibals, of how Friday was a cannibal whom he had saved from being roasted and devoured by fellow cannibals…So in the end I did not know what was truth, what was lies, and what was mere rambling.
Seen from too remote a vantage, life begins to lose its particularity. All shipwrecks become the same shipwreck, all castaways the same castaway, sunburnt, lonely, clad in the skins of the beast he has slain. The truth that makes your story yours alone, that sets you apart from the old mariner by the fireside spinning yarns of sea monsters and mermaids, resides in a thousand touches which today may seem of no importance, such as: when you made your needle…by what means did you pierce the eye? When you sewed your hat, what did you use for thread? Touches like these will one day persuade your countrymen that it is all true, every word, there was an indeed once an island in the middle of the ocean where the wind blew and the gulls cried from the cliffs.
I used once to think, when I saw Cruso in this evening posture, that, like me, he was searching the horizon for a sail. But I was mistaken. His visit to the bluff belonged to a practice of losing himself in the contemplation of the waste of water and sky. Friday never interrupted him during these retreats; when one site innocently approached him, I was rebuffed with angry words, and for days afterwards he and I did not speak. To me, sea and sky remained sea and sky, vacant and tedious. I had not the temperament to love such emptiness.
When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: of being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso. Is that the fate of all storytellers? Yet I was as much a body as Cruso. I ate and drank, I woke and slept…Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr. Foe: that is my entreaty for though my story gives the truth, it does not give the substance of the truth (I see that clearly, we need not pretend it is otherwise). To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet, and a comfortable chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through; and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes, and of feeling the tropic sun when it is cold; and at your fingertips the words with which to capture the vision before it fades. I have none of these, while you have all.
Dubiously I thought: are these enough strange circumstances to make a story of? How long before I am driven to invent new and stranger circumstances: the salvage of tools and muskets from Cruso’s ship; the building of a boat, or at least a skiff, an adventure to sail to the mainland; a landing by cannibals on the island, followed by a skirmish and many bloody deaths; and, at last, becoming of a golden haired stranger with a sack of corn, and the planting of the terraces? Alas, will the day ever arrive when we can make a story without strange circumstances?
You will believe me when I say the life we lead grows less and less distinct from the life we lead on Cruso’s island. Sometimes I wake up not knowing where I am. The world is full of islands, said Cruso once. His words ring truer every day.
I am not a story, Mr. Foe. I may impress you as a story because I began my account of myself without preamble, slipping overboard into the water and striking out for the shore. But my life did not begin in the waves. There was a life before the water which stretched back to my desolate searchings in Brazil, thence to the years when my daughter was still with me, and so on back to the day I was born. All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world. I choose rather to tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire.
But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies have their own signs. It is the home of Friday.
He turns and turns till he lies at full length, his face to my face. The skin is tight across his bones, his lips are drawn back. I pass a fingernail across his teeth, trying to find a way in.
His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face.
Islands Symbol Timeline in Foe
