Storytelling and Power
J. M. Coetzee’s Foe imagines an origin story for Daniel Defoe’s famous 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, about a white castaway named Crusoe and his Black manservant Friday. In Coetzee’s version, the story is told to Defoe by Susan Barton, an English widow stranded on Cruso’s island towards the end of his life. Upon her return to England, Susan insists that she is the only one who can tell the story of…
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Enslavement, Silence, and Erasure
J. M. Coetzee’s Foe retells the story of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe through the perspective of a white Englishwoman named Susan Barton, who was stranded on a desert island with Cruso. As Susan narrates both her time on the island and her return to London, her stories are filled with mentions of Friday, a young Black man who was the only other survivor of Cruso’s shipwreck. Friday has mysteriously…
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Embellishment vs. Deception
When Susan Barton, the narrator of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Foe, tries to tell the story of her time on Robinson Cruso’s island, she struggles to make the story interesting: after all, so much of her time there was monotonous, spent braving the elements in silence with Cruso and his servant Friday. So in an effort to entice her audience, Susan begins to embellish, comparing herself to a painter “selecting…
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Gender and Creation
In Foe, J. M. Coetzee reimagines Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of Susan Barton, a castaway and the lone female witness to Cruso’s time on an abandoned island. When Susan returns to England in the early 1700s, she is desperate to have Mr. Foe—a famous London writer of adventure stories—write and publish Cruso’s tale. But Foe is initially less interested in Cruso than he is in Susan’s…
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