The Fog of Time in "Waiting For The Barbarians"

One of the most interesting stylistic aspects of J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting For The Barbarians is the persistent use of the present tense in the Magistrate’s narrative. While such a convention is certainly not unique in writing, it is nevertheless slightly out of the ordinary, and even rare in literature, to read a story that is happening as the narrator is recounting it. This stylistic facet gives the novel a very personal and in-the-moment feel that not only creates a link between the Magistrate and the reader (through which the desired philosophical ideas of the story are conveyed), but also implies the active passing of time. Within this temporal context, the reader is trapped with the Magistrate in a metaphysical fog of the unknown, for the story is actively developing and therefore unknown to neither the reader nor the narrator. While the novel does not explicitly cast any such active recognition of limited knowledge into the reader, the feeling of being trapped with a narrator who does not know what the future holds is inescapable. The uncertainty that is created is fitting for the world into which time is taking the Magistrate.
When taken together, the personal and the temporal aspects of the novel strengthen the presentation of the Magistrate’s dilemma: the onset of a dark period of tyranny, abuses, and general unease. The fog of the present adds to the development of this unease and leaves both the narrator and the reader looking into the horrors to come. (248)

A Brief Summary of “The Failure of Metaphysics”

“The Failure of Metaphysics” by Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan

~ Marlow assumes responsibility for Kurtz, a rejected and failed ‘other’ who becomes effectively a ‘twin’ or a ‘double.’ In this sense Marlow denies one of the underlying predicament of the modernist outlook: the separation of one man from another, of man from nature, and of language from the world. (See last point)

~ Marlow’s journey is characterized by a spiritual detachment that is rooted in a desire to truly understand the world around him. He is essentially searching for “lost vitality” and “the essential wholeness man has lost in the course of his material progress” in the context of the intellectual pessimism of modernism.

~ Marlow’s journey begins as a pilgrimage, but his skeptical and pessimistic discourse signals the collapse of metaphysics within his tale and therefore the rejection of the concept of the journey as a pilgrimage.

~ Any illuminating significance within the metaphysical concept of the journey as a pilgrimage is further atrophied by the perennial absence of any object that would present a positive meaning to ‘the heart of darkness’ in the text. Conrad’s presentation of the failure of language and his use of language in the text, with nebulous adjectives and abstract nouns, indicates this absence within the “ultimately undecipherable nature of reality.” Essentially, the metaphysical journey has the spiritual drive, but lacks the object with which to find meaning. (This again links to the pessimism of the modern style)

~ Kurtz was established at the beginning of Marlow’s journey as a symbol of great ideals; however, just like all the other characters that Marlow meets in his story, Kurtz is in actuality “a paragon of the blind omnivorous greed” the drove the conquest of Africa. Kurtz is dethroned as a “sham idol” as the “metaphysical aura is stripped off” and collapses.

~ Marlow, with his story telling, subverts the idea of authority by denying the power of the teller’s voice (“there was nothing behind me,” pg. 28). The metaphysical transcendence of the artist is therefore nullified.

~ Marlow assimilates Kurtz’s ‘Voice’ and ‘Word’ in order to redeem the ‘other’ and his ideals through himself.

The Destruction of a Family

The final section of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury brings the story full circle with a closing in which the Compson family has finally destroyed itself. The novel focuses on the decline and destruction of the family as carried out by the individual family members: by the final section Quentin (number one) committed suicide; Father drank himself to death; Caddy tarnished the family pride and drove a wedge into the family’s inner relationships; Roskus passed away; and T.P., Versh, and Froney presumably moved on to greater things in their lives. The remaining characters all find their own end on Easter Sunday, 1928: Mother resigns to her bedroom where she presumably gives up her life; Quentin (number two) runs away from home; Jason has his hoarded money, which is perhaps most prized possession, stolen from him and is humiliated by his inability to retrieve it; Luster is beaten down by Jason; Benjy is left with a flower, symbolic of a peaceful state, that has been broken; and Dilsey, the true matriarch of the family, experiences the saving power of Christ through the visiting preacher. Every family member and servant has either died or moved on from the family’s ‘curse,’ thereby completing the effect of that curse and completing the decline of the family. The portrayed order at the end of the novel is therefore the calm-after-the-storm tranquility and serenity that is left in the vacuum of the family’s final collapse. (241)