Rewriting the Island: Colonial Power, Silence and Storytelling in Robinson Crusoe and Foe
Keywords: Defoe, Coetzee, Robinson Crusoe, Foe, postcolonial rewriting, silence, authorship, gender, labour, intertextuality, metafiction
📖 BLOG OVERVIEW — KEY THEMES AND ARGUMENTS
Colonial Power
One island, two radically different questions
Silence
Friday's tonguelessness and its five meanings
Authorship
Who holds the pen? Who controls the story?
Gender
Susan Barton's fight for narrative authority
Rewriting
A self-aware postcolonial retelling
1. Introduction: One Island, Two Questions
When I first read Robinson Crusoe (1719), I read it as a story of survival and cleverness. A man loses everything, builds a life from wrecked goods and ends up richer than before. When I read J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986), the same island changed. I stopped asking "How does Crusoe survive?" and began asking "Who is telling me this, and who has been left out?"
That change of question is the subject of this blog. In both novels the island is more than a place. It is a testing ground for ideas about labour, property, religion, race, gender and the right to tell another person's story. Defoe gives us a narrator who arranges the world around himself. Coetzee gives us a narrator, Susan Barton, who cannot control her own story, and a man, Friday, whose story she cannot tell at all.
My argument has three parts.
🔢 THREE-PART ARGUMENT
1. Robinson Crusoe is more complicated than the phrase "colonial propaganda" suggests. It is built on religious fear and spiritual guilt as well as pride in enterprise. Still, its structure puts one man in control of time, land, language and other people's names.
2. Foe does not simply correct this. It shows that the problem is not only what Defoe said, but who gets to speak in a story. Coetzee refuses to hand Friday a ready-made voice, because that would repeat the same act of control.
3. The comparison is richest when we avoid two easy answers: "Defoe is the villain, Coetzee is the cure." The better answer is that Foe reads Crusoe as a text it cannot escape, and its honesty about this is its main achievement.
The Island: a testing ground for power, labour, religion and the right to tell another person's story
2. Context: Two Worlds, Two Kinds of Authority
2.1 Defoe's World (1719)
⚓ DEFOE'S WORLD: KEY CONTEXTS
⚖️ Trade and Expansion — Crusoe is a sailor, a trader and later a planter. The novel belongs to a time of overseas trade, plantations and slave-holding, presenting these as normal parts of an adventurous life.
✝️ A Religious Story under an Adventure Story — Bertrand explains that the novel follows the Puritan pattern of "spiritual autobiography": a person disobeys, suffers, repents and is forgiven (Bertrand 31–32).
🌿 Eden and the Fall — Bertrand reads Crusoe as a "new Adam" who ends up in a garden-like place. The island remains "an ambiguous paradise" (Bertrand 34). Crusoe does not feel like a conqueror at first — he feels like a sinner.
💰 Individualism and Economy — Ian Watt, quoted by Goh, describes Crusoe as looking at nature "with the calculating gaze of a colonial capitalist" (Watt, qtd. in Goh 119).
🌍 Empire — Edward Said, according to Goh, reads Crusoe as a mirror to, or even an agent of, empire (Goh 116, n. 28).
2.2 Coetzee's World (1986)
Foe was published in South Africa in the 1980s, when apartheid still shaped the country. Coetzee was a white South African, and Goh notes that this fact matters because he is rewriting an English classic mostly through a white woman's eyes (Goh 115).
Coetzee had been thinking about Crusoe for a long time. In his Nobel Lecture he places a very old Crusoe in Bristol, imagining him reading the reports of a mysterious "man" who writes things Crusoe could never have thought of himself. The lecture asks whether Crusoe and this man are "master and slave," "twin brothers," "comrades in arms" or "enemies, foes" (Coetzee, "He and His Man"). That question is almost a summary of Foe.
Coetzee also wrote an essay called "Idleness in South Africa," which Brown links to the novel. It discusses how colonial writers described both the Khoisan and the poor Boer as "idle," and how Protestant ideas of work shaped these judgments (Brown 592–594).
2.3 Why the Distance of 267 Years Matters
⏳ THE 267-YEAR GAP: THREE KEY DIFFERENCES
Defoe tells his story as if it were fact, with dates, accounts and a confident "I."
Coetzee tells his story knowing that the earlier story has already had a long life as a "cultural memory" (Goh 118, citing Alkon).
Goh's key insight is that Foe places itself before Crusoe. It imagines that Defoe's novel grew from Susan's story, which he then twisted (Goh 118). So the later book becomes the imagined origin of the earlier one — forcing us to read time backwards.
3. Narrative Structure: Who Holds the Pen?
I do not want to retell every plot event, so I will focus on structure, since structure carries ideas.
3.1 Robinson Crusoe
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Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe
- One narrator tells his whole life. Bertrand divides it into three stages: adventures at sea, the island, and the return to civilization (Bertrand 30).
- Everything is organized around Crusoe's need to order the world: calendar, fortress, farm, goats, laws.
- The reader sees Friday only through Crusoe's reading of him.
3.2 Foe
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Foe (1986) by J. M. Coetzee
- Part One is Susan's account of the island, told to Foe.
- Part Two is a series of letters from Susan to Foe, where she complains that he does not reply.
- Part Three is her conversation with Foe in his hiding place. Foe tells her to teach Friday to write (Coetzee 152).
- Part Four begins with the same sentence as Part Three, but in the present tense: "The staircase is dark and mean" (Coetzee 153). An unnamed narrator walks through Foe's room, reads Susan's manuscript and finally dives into the wreck to find Friday (Goh 129–133).
3.3 What the Structure Argues
I think the two shapes teach two lessons.
📐 TWO SHAPES, TWO ARGUMENTS
Defoe's shape suggests closure. Crusoe starts poor, struggles, learns, wins and returns. The story ends because the man has mastered his situation.
Coetzee's shape suggests interruption. Letters, argument, a daughter who may not be a daughter, and a final section that breaks the realist pattern all tell us that no narrator is in full control. Goh calls these "breaches in narrative temporality" (Goh 124–128).
So the structure of each novel is already an argument about authority.
4. Colonial Authority: How Crusoe Rules, and How Foe Notices
4.1 Crusoe, Time and Mastery
Goh points out that Crusoe is obsessed with time. He cuts notches in a wooden cross, keeps a dated journal for as long as his ink lasts, and plants crops according to the rainy and dry seasons. The whole stay is counted precisely: "eight and twenty Years, two Months, and 19 Days" (Defoe, qtd. in Goh 119). Goh's argument is that this careful timekeeping is a tool of possession. It lets Crusoe "improve" the land, to use the word of Defoe's age (Goh 119).
Here is a detail that supports and complicates this. A literary article on the "Man Friday" name notes that Crusoe never actually calls him "Man Friday," and that, by Crusoe's own admission, his count of days had gone wrong (Interesting Literature). If so, the name "Friday" is attached to a day that Crusoe's calendar may have mislabelled. The man who controls time to control the island names another person after a day he may have miscounted. I treat this as a suggestive point rather than proof, because it comes from a general literary website and not a peer-reviewed study.
4.2 Naming, Language and Religion
The key passage in the novel is simple and cold. Crusoe writes that he made Friday "know his Name should be Friday, which was the Day I sav'd his Life," and that he "likewise taught him to say Master" (Defoe, Oxford ed., quoted in the publisher's description). I notice the order of the lessons. First a name, then the word for who is in charge.
Friday's body language is also described as total surrender. The Mark Twain page at the University of Virginia, which discusses illustrations of this scene, quotes Crusoe saying Friday made "all the signs to me of subjection, servitude, and submission imaginable" ("Robinson Crusoe Illustration"). Defoe's text does not hide what is happening. The hierarchy is written out in the open.
4.3 Friday and the "Manichean" World
Bertrand uses Frantz Fanon to describe this relationship. In Fanon's picture of colonialism the colonizer sees the native as the "quintessence of evil" and himself as morally superior (Fanon, qtd. in Bertrand 36). Bertrand notes that Friday never questions Crusoe's superiority. Even his questions about the Bible end up strengthening Crusoe's faith, and Crusoe admits that in teaching Friday he "really informed and instructed" himself (Defoe, qtd. in Bertrand 36).
4.4 A Fair Point for Defoe: Cracks in the Surface
I do not want to treat Crusoe as a flat piece of propaganda, for three reasons.
🔍 THREE REASONS NOT TO FLATTEN CRUSOE
1. Crusoe is anxious, not just proud. Bertrand shows that the island begins as a punishment and that Crusoe's conversion comes after terror and illness (Bertrand 35).
2. Friday's voice is faintly audible. Peter Hulme, quoted by Bertrand, notes that Friday gives a different account of Carib habits than Crusoe's "lurid vision." Friday says the Caribs eat only the flesh of those who attack them (Hulme, qtd. in Bertrand 36–37). Bertrand calls this a faint voice that pierces "the cracks of dominant discursive practices."
3. Historical caution. A McMaster University thesis abstract argues that eighteenth-century ideas about race were different from ours, so we should be careful about reading Crusoe as a simple "colonial handbook" ("Altering a Legacy"). I use it as a caution, not a full argument.
My view is that Defoe's novel contains the mechanisms of colonial authority and also contains small spaces where that authority is unsure of itself. Foe works by widening those spaces.
4.5 Coetzee's Revisions: From Crusoe to Cruso
- The missing "e" in "Cruso" signals that this man is a reduced version of the original. Goh calls him a "limit-figure" for the failure of progress (Goh 114–115).
- Cruso keeps no calendar and no journal. Susan searched his hut for notches or records and found none: "Cruso kept no journal" (Coetzee 16; Goh 119).
- Friday is no longer "European" in feature. Defoe's Friday has "all the Sweetness and Softness of an European" and a nose "not flat like the Negroes" (Defoe, qtd. in Goh 120). Coetzee gives us "a Negro with a head of fuzzy wool" (Coetzee 5, qtd. in Goh 120). Goh argues this reverses Defoe's "Europeanization" of Friday.
- Most importantly, Friday has no tongue.
Coetzee takes away the three tools of Crusoe's mastery one by one: the calendar, the useful labour and the teachable servant.
Video: Robinson Crusoe and Foe — Colonial Power and Narrative
5. Friday: Voice, Silence and Agency
This is the heart of the comparison, so I want to argue slowly.
5.1 Friday in Defoe: the "Aptest Scholar"
Coetzee opens his Nobel Lecture with a line from Crusoe about teaching Friday "to speak, and understand me when I spoke," and calls him "the aptest scholar there ever was" (Defoe, quoted in Coetzee, "He and His Man"). The line shows what Crusoe values. A good Friday is a good learner of Crusoe's language.
Goh adds that Defoe's Friday ends the novel as an "exemplary colonial subject," quoting Spivak: "He learns his master's speech, does his master's work, happily swears loyalty, believes the culture of the master is better, and kills his other self" (Spivak, qtd. in Goh 121). The "other self" is the bear Friday kills during the mountain crossing. This is a picture of a person being made to destroy a part of himself for his master's pleasure.
5.2 Friday in Foe: Five Meanings of Silence
Coetzee does not give Friday a neat inner life. Instead, he gives us a silence that several people try to interpret. I see at least five readings, and I think the novel wants all of them to stay alive.
🤫 FIVE MEANINGS OF FRIDAY'S SILENCE
1. Violence
The loss of the tongue is a physical wound; no account of it can be trusted
2. Historical Erasure
Friday stands for countless people whose experience never entered the record
3. Limit on Susan
"The story of Friday's tongue is a story unable to be told, or unable to be told by me" (Coetzee 118)
4. Resistance
Spivak: Friday is the "guardian at the margin" — he withholds meaning and wipes the slate clean
5. Translation Failure
Perhaps not every human experience fits into the language of the powerful
5.3 The Critical Debate about Friday
Here I want to show that critics disagree, because that disagreement is part of the answer.
⚖️ THE CRITICAL DEBATE: FIVE POSITIONS ON FRIDAY'S SILENCE
Spivak's position — Friday is a "curious guardian at the margin" — not only a victim but an agent who holds something back (Spivak, qtd. in Goh 116).
Benita Parry's objection — Friday's muteness is a violent denial of the oppressed person's narrative authority (Goh 131). If the colonized person never speaks, is the novel just repeating the silencing?
Coetzee's reply — "Friday does not disappear, because Friday is body," and "the suffering body takes this authority" (Coetzee, qtd. in Goh 131). A powerful answer, though it risks having the body "read" again by the white writer.
Zimbler's contextual point — "Black voices" were already being published by black writers in South Africa (Goh 131, n. 125). The idea that the colonized "cannot speak" may be a literary fiction, not a historical fact.
Attwell's reading — In trying to represent Friday the author discovers that Friday's story "is not his to tell" (Attwell, qtd. in Goh 130–131).
5.4 My Position
By keeping Friday silent, Coetzee makes the reader feel the cost of every attempt to speak for him. But I also accept Parry's challenge as a real limit. A novel that ends by admitting it cannot speak for Friday still leaves Friday without a voice on the page. I think this is why the ending feels honest and unsatisfying at the same time.
5.5 The Three Readings of Friday inside the Novel
👁️ THREE READINGS OF FRIDAY INSIDE FOE
Susan's Reading
Wants to understand him; sometimes treats him like a dumb animal; scolds his flute-playing as "savage" (Coetzee 95, qtd. in Brown 592)
Foe's Reading
Wants to "make Friday's silence speak" (Coetzee 142); treats silence as a puzzle to solve
The Last Narrator's Reading
Does not demand speech; listens, sees and touches. Goh: a move from voice-giving to attentive listening (Goh 132–133)
I find this movement from asking to listening the most hopeful part of the book. Spivak, however, warns that this scene may be a "wish fulfilment," and that Friday's body is not its own sign (Spivak, qtd. in Goh 133). Goh agrees with her partly, but adds that Coetzee does not claim to understand Friday, only to try another way of relating to him.
The Shore of Silence: Friday's story as the unresolved horizon of both novels
6. Susan Barton: Gender, Authorship and the Right to Be Believed
6.1 A Woman in a Man's Story
In Defoe's novel women hardly count. Goh shows that Crusoe's wife is mentioned in a clause and then dies, which clears the way for his next voyage (Defoe, qtd. in Goh 124). At the end, he sends "seven Women" to the island in the same sentence as cows and sheep (Defoe, qtd. in Goh 124). Watt, quoted by Goh, sums it up: "in this novel women only have one important role to play, and that is economic" (Watt, qtd. in Goh 124).
Coetzee places a woman at the centre. Susan arrives with a dead captain at her feet (Brown 592, n. 3) and goes on to tell the story of Cruso and Friday. When she goes to the London writer Foe, she asks him to write her story truthfully. His interest, though, lies in selling a better plot.
6.2 The Fight over the Middle of the Story
Susan says her island story has a beginning and an end but lacks "a middle," which is the part where something dramatic should happen. Foe wants to fill it in. According to Goh, Susan objects to his idea of "inventing cannibals and pirates," because "these I would not accept because they were not the truth" (Coetzee 121, qtd. in Goh 122). Foe also wants to fold the island into a larger story of Susan's search for her lost daughter. She rejects this too.
This is a very practical picture of how stories are shaped by the market. The writer wants a product, and the real experience is judged by whether it will sell.
6.3 Power over a Story
- Susan tries to defend her control: "It is still in my power to guide and amend. Above all, to withhold. By such means do I still endeavour to be father to my story" (Coetzee 123, qtd. in Goh 127, n. 102). The word "father" is important. She claims the same kind of authority that male authors have.
- But Goh argues that her position is weaker than she thinks. If we read Foe as the origin of Defoe's two books, Susan's story is expunged from Crusoe and her life is turned into the scandalous Roxana, so she is both erased and sexualized (Goh 122–123). Susan, who once insisted she was "a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire" (Coetzee 131), ends up in the role of teacher to Friday, doing the work Foe has assigned to her (Goh 123).
6.4 Susan Is Not Friday
I want to be careful here. It would be easy to say that Susan and Friday are "both silenced" and leave it there. But they are silenced in different ways.
⚖️ SUSAN AND FRIDAY: TWO DIFFERENT SILENCINGS
Susan — Can speak, write, argue and bargain, even if a man controls publication.
Friday — Cannot speak at all, and his body carries evidence of violence.
Spivak's point — Feminism and anticolonialism are two kinds of "marginality" that do not always agree (Goh 115–116). Coetzee's refusal to merge the two is one of the book's best qualities.
6.5 The Daughter and the Doubles
A strange part of the novel is the young woman who claims to be Susan's daughter and also calls herself Susan Barton, along with her servant Amy. Goh points out that these characters come from Defoe's Roxana (1724), which means they have crossed from one novel into another (Goh 128). Susan does not recognize them, and in a moment of panic she asks: "Who is speaking? Am I a phantom too?" (Coetzee 133, qtd. in Goh 127). For me this is the moment when the novel admits that its narrator is a literary creation.
Two Writers, One Colonial Study: Defoe and Coetzee across 267 years
7. Labour, Property and Economic Power
7.1 Crusoe's Labour: Work as a Claim
- Crusoe builds a fortress, farms, domesticates animals and creates tools. Bertrand notes that his "application" and "improvement" mean both spiritual and material things, and cites Michael McKeon's remark that Crusoe uses the words as "synonyms for material industry" (McKeon, qtd. in Bertrand 34).
- Bertrand argues that we should combine both the economic and the religious approaches to reading the novel, and I agree. In Crusoe, labour is a way of being saved and a way of owning.
- The main assumption, which I would question, is that effort gives a right to possession. Crusoe never asks who lived on the island or in nearby lands before he arrived, or whether his effort is the only kind that counts.
7.2 Cruso's Labour: Work that Produces Nothing
In Foe, Cruso builds twelve levels of terraces but has no seeds to plant. "The planting is not for us," he says (Coetzee 33). Susan finds this "a foolish kind of agriculture" (Coetzee 34, qtd. in Goh 114).
Brown gives me a way to see this differently. He argues that the terracing is a kind of work that clears space for an arrival that may never come, waiting for "some saviour castaway" with a sack of corn (Coetzee 32, qtd. in Brown 590). It is also work that "devours" the lives of the workers. Brown links this to Coetzee's essay, where idleness is seen as a sin because Protestant thought treats work as a duty after Adam's fall (Brown 592–593).
7.3 A Light Marxist Point
- Crusoe's work looks like individual achievement. But it depends on salvaged goods from a wreck, on the labour of others in his earlier life (he was a slave-trader and planter, a fact the story treats as background), and on Friday's labour afterwards.
- Foe adds a different economy: the economy of stories. Susan is poor and needs money. Foe is in debt and in hiding from bailiffs, and he is a professional writer who needs a product. The story becomes a commodity whose value depends on what readers will buy.
8. Religion, Civilization and Cultural Difference
8.1 Defoe: Faith as Order
Bertrand argues that, in Defoe, "divine order manifests itself" in prophecy, in Crusoe's conversion, in the fortress, in the domestication of the island and in the relationship with Friday (Bertrand 34–35). Crusoe's dream of the burning figure with a spear is a turning point. The figure says, "Seeing all these things have not brought thee to repentance, now thou shalt die" (Defoe, qtd. in Bertrand 35). Brown adds that this figure is ambiguous. We cannot tell whether he is good or evil, which is typical of Defoe's writing on apparitions (Brown 587–588).
Friday's conversion is then treated as a natural next step. Crusoe teaches, Friday accepts and the hierarchy of civilization over "savagery" feels like part of God's plan. Bertrand says that this suggests either a flaw in the divine order, which could not lift all humans from "savagery," or a flaw in the human agent who could not overcome his own ethnocentric limits (Bertrand 36).
8.2 Coetzee: No Replacement Religion, Only Doubt
Foe does not hold up an alternative faith. Instead it keeps blurring the line between angel and cannibal. Brown observes that when Susan first sees Friday, his shadow falls "not of a cloud but of a man with a dazzling halo about him," but he also carries a spear, and she thinks "I have come to an island of cannibals" (Coetzee 5–6, qtd. in Brown 589). This echoes Crusoe's dream. Brown's argument is that angel and cannibal are "dialectically entwined." The one who looks like a saviour may also be read as a threat, and the other way around (Brown 585).
✝️ RELIGION IN CRUSOE VS. FOE — A DIALECTICAL VIEW
📖 Defoe's Faith — Conversion confirms order; civilization and Christianity are bound together; Friday must be taught both
👼 Angel or Cannibal? — In Foe, the figures of angel and cannibal cannot be told apart; the saviour and the threat are "dialectically entwined" (Brown 585)
👻 Ghost or Person? — Foe admits: "as to who among us is a ghost and who not I have nothing to say" (Coetzee 134, qtd. in Brown 595)
🔥 Crusoe's Dream — The burning figure (good or evil?) is ambiguous; typical of Defoe's writing on apparitions (Brown 587–588)
8.3 Fairness
I do not want to say that Christianity is "bad" in Crusoe. Bertrand's article is helpful because it shows how religion and colonial order become tied together in the story. What I criticize is the use of faith to confirm a hierarchy, not faith itself. Foe treats this carefully by showing a world where nobody can be sure who is a ghost and who is a person. Foe himself says, "as to who among us is a ghost and who not I have nothing to say" (Coetzee 134, qtd. in Brown 595).
9. Intertextuality and Metafiction
🔗 Intertextuality: a text talks to, borrows from or rewrites another text.
🪞 Metafiction: fiction that shows that it is fiction and draws attention to the act of writing.
9.1 How Foe Depends on Crusoe
The novel assumes that the reader knows Defoe's story. If you do not know that Crusoe had a servant called Friday, you miss what has been changed. It also borrows from Roxana. Goh says that for readers who know Defoe's other novel, the arrival of the girl and Amy is "an uncanny experience" because we recognise them as characters who do not belong to the island story (Goh 128). He borrows Freud's idea of the "uncanny," the feeling when something familiar returns in an unfamiliar way (Goh 125–126).
9.2 The Metafictional Turn
Foe is a writer character who shapes Susan's story. Part Four makes the book itself a character: the unnamed narrator reads Susan's manuscript, quotes her sentence "With a sigh, making barely a splash, I slip overboard," and then does the same (Goh 130). Goh suggests this narrator might be a version of Coetzee, and he cites Coetzee's notebook entry from 24 October 1983, where he wrote that the only figure he could make live was himself: "When am I going to enter?" (Coetzee, qtd. in Goh 130). Marais, quoted by Goh, also sees the narrator as a "reader-figure" who stands for our own responsibility as readers (Goh 136).
9.3 Ownership of Stories
In his Nobel Lecture Coetzee describes how Crusoe feels toward imitators who "descended upon his island history." At first they seem like cannibals, but later Crusoe feels "fellow-feeling" because "there are but a handful of stories in the world" (Coetzee, "He and His Man"). Brown uses this passage as the starting point for his whole article (Brown 585). Goh connects the issue to copyright. Law treats an author as the first and sole owner of a work. But Foe shows that stories pass from hand to hand and that earlier voices can be erased (Goh 134–136).
9.4 A Question I Still Have
Brown criticises critics who treat Foe as a "corrective" of Crusoe. He argues that this reading is itself cannibalistic because it "devours" the older text (Brown 587). But I wonder whether a purely friendly reading loses too much. If we say Foe "embraces" Crusoe as a fellow, do we forget the real harm that Crusoe helped to normalize? I will return to this in my critical section below.
🔗 INTERTEXTUALITY AND METAFICTION IN FOE
Borrows from Crusoe
Assumes reader knowledge; changes what the reader already knows
Borrows from Roxana
The girl and Amy cross from one novel into another — "uncanny" (Goh 128)
Metafictional Author
Foe = writer inside the story; Coetzee may enter as the Part Four narrator
Copyright and Story-Ownership
Law says one author, one moment. Foe says stories belong to time (Goh 134–136)
Stories torn between texts, times and authors — intertextuality in Foe
10. The Titles
"Robinson Crusoe" names one man. The title says whose life matters. The longer original title adds "Mariner" and "of York," placing him firmly in English society. "Foe" points to the writer, a fictional Daniel Foe, and to the surname Defoe. Goh notes that Defoe added "De-" later in life (Goh 118, n. 33), so "Foe" is the older name. It also reads as "foe," an enemy. Goh argues that Defoe becomes the "foe" of Susan because he expunges her (Goh 122).
Brown reverses this. For him Foe is not the "enemy" of Crusoe but its fellow, and he thinks the title helps us see the two texts as partners (Brown 595–596). Coetzee's lecture hints at both readings when it asks if "he" and "his man" are "twin brothers" or "enemies, foes" (Coetzee, "He and His Man").
The title stays open. It names a writer, an enemy and a relationship — and a good reading holds all three.
11. Comparing the Two Novels at a Glance
📊 ROBINSON CRUSOE VS. FOE — KEY COMPARISONS
| Aspect | Robinson Crusoe (1719) | Foe (1986) |
|---|---|---|
| Historical context | Early 18th-century trade, empire, Puritan religion | Late 20th century; apartheid South Africa; postcolonial and feminist thought |
| Main perspective | One confident male narrator | A female narrator whose story is contested, then an unnamed narrator |
| Central narrators | Crusoe | Susan Barton; the unnamed narrator in Part Four |
| Friday | Loyal, quick learner, converted | Mute, unreadable, withholding |
| Colonial authority | Crusoe rules and is rewarded | Authority is questioned and exposed as storytelling |
| Language and communication | Language is taught from master to servant | Language fails; listening and touch take its place |
| Gender and narrative power | Women are marginal and economic | A woman fights for authorship, but a man controls publication |
| Labour and property | Work earns possession and wealth | Work (terracing) is pointless and linked to fear of "idleness" |
| Religion and cultural difference | Conversion confirms order | Angels and cannibals cannot be told apart |
| Authorship and storytelling | The author hides behind "true account" | The act of writing is itself the topic |
| Treatment of silence | Friday's inner life is absent | Silence is central and has many meanings |
| Ending | Crusoe returns to wealth; sends women and livestock to the island | Open, dreamlike, ends with a touch "against the skin of my face" |
The table helps me see that the difference is not only content but also authority. Defoe's ending feels complete because Crusoe controls the account. Coetzee's ending feels unfinished because it refuses to pretend to control Friday's.
12. Critical Engagement: Where Do I Stand in the Scholarly Debate?
12.1 The Four Main Positions I Found
⚖️ FOUR CRITICAL POSITIONS ON FOE
| Position | Core Idea | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Foe as corrective | Coetzee resists the "patriarchal master text" | Macaskill and Colleran (qtd. in Brown 587) |
| 2. Foe as fellow | The two novels are entangled; Foe "embraces" Crusoe | Brown |
| 3. Foe as time-bending origin | The later book imagines itself before the earlier, challenging ideas of ownership | Goh |
| 4. Friday as "guardian at the margin" | Friday withholds; he is not just a victim | Spivak (qtd. in Goh) |
12.2 Kieran Brown, "Faux Apparitions"
Argument. Brown uses the figures of angels and cannibals to argue that critics who treat Foe as an improvement or "end" of Crusoe are performing a kind of cannibalism. Foe is "not a corrective to Robinson Crusoe, its ideal or end," he says, and instead "embraces it as a fellow cannibal" (Brown 585). Simple version. If you read one book only to prove that it is better than another, you are "eating" the other book. A better reading lets them live side by side. Scene. Cruso's terraces, which Brown reads as work that devours life while preparing for a saviour who may never come (Brown 590). What I gain. He stops me from treating Defoe as a villain and Coetzee as a hero. That simple story is too easy. What I question. Brown's partnership of "cannibals" is philosophical and beautiful, but it risks softening the political question. Defoe's Friday was made to say "Master." Coetzee's Friday has no tongue. Are these really equal "cannibals"? I want the novel's reading of violence to stay sharp.
12.3 Benjamin Goh, "Postcolonial Temporality"
Argument. Goh reads Foe through time. The novel looks like a realist story set in the 18th century, but it repeatedly breaks into other times, especially the present of its writing and reading. This breaks with copyright law's picture of an author who creates a work at one moment and owns it (Goh 134–136). Simple version. Law thinks a book comes from one person at one time. Foe shows that a book is made again each time it is read. Scene. The switch to present tense at the start of Part Four (Goh 129). What I gain. The idea that Foe places itself before Crusoe makes me ask who "owns" the origin of a story. What I question. Goh's final section asks questions rather than answering them, and he admits this is a first step in a longer project (Goh 136–137). I would like to see more evidence of how Coetzee himself saw ownership.
12.4 Didier Bertrand, "Order and Chaos in Paradise"
Argument. Bertrand shows that Defoe builds an order grounded in Protestant belief, where civilization seems to come from God, and that this order connects to colonial power. He then argues that Michel Tournier's Friday challenges that order (Bertrand 29–30). Simple version. In Defoe, being civilized and being Christian are tied together, so Friday must be taught both. Scene. Friday's questions about the Bible, which end up strengthening Crusoe's faith (Bertrand 36). What I gain. It gives me a vocabulary (spiritual autobiography, Eden, Manichean hierarchy) for the religious side of Crusoe's colonial authority. Limit. Most of this article is about Tournier, not Coetzee. I use only its reading of Defoe and a short note that other critics treat Foe as a postmodern example (Bertrand 37). I do not claim it explains Foe.
12.5 Spivak, Attridge, Parry and Zimbler (Through Goh and Brown)
Spivak's essay is "Theory in the Margin: Coetzee's Foe Reading Defoe's 'Crusoe/Roxana'," English in Africa 17.2 (1990). Goh says she saw a "spatial bias" in the novel (the margin) and that Goh himself wants to add the dimension of time (Goh 116–117). Brown notes that Derek Attridge, whom he quotes, calls Crusoe "Western Culture's most potent crystallization" of ideas about the individual and the master and servant (Attridge, qtd. in Brown 587). These critics cannot all be right in the same way, and that is why the discussion remains alive.
12.6 My Own Position in One Paragraph
I argue that Foe is best read as a self-aware rewriting: it exposes the colonial and patriarchal habits inside Crusoe, but it also exposes its own risk of repeating them. I side with Brown that a purely "corrective" reading is too simple, and with Spivak and Parry that the political stakes cannot be dissolved into friendship between texts. The most honest conclusion is that Foe shows a problem and does not solve it.
13. Possible Objections to My Argument, and My Replies
🗣️ OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES
Objection 1: "You are reading too much into Defoe. He was writing an adventure story."
Reply: The novel's own structure — with its religious guilt, calendar, naming and property — shows these ideas were central. Bertrand and Goh both show that the details are not accidental (Bertrand 34–36; Goh 119).
Objection 2: "Friday's silence is just a trick. Coetzee is avoiding responsibility."
Reply: Parry's objection is strong, and I take it seriously. But the silence is not empty. It forces every other character — and the reader — to reveal their desires. Susan's frustration, Foe's ambition and the last narrator's patience all show what each person wants from Friday.
Objection 3: "If Brown is right, then criticism of Defoe's colonialism is itself cannibalistic."
Reply: I do not think Brown says criticism must stop. He says that criticism should not simply declare itself the "end" of a text. I can criticize Defoe's treatment of Friday and still read Crusoe with attention.
Objection 4: "Susan is the heroine. Why complicate her?"
Reply: Because the novel does. She fights for her story, but she also speaks for Friday and uses his silence. A heroine can still be limited.
14. Why This Still Matters
I choose three connections and keep each modest.
🌍 CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE — THREE CONNECTIONS
Who Speaks for Whom
In classrooms, news and films, some people are still described more than they are heard. Foe teaches us to ask whether "giving a voice" gives power — or just makes someone easier to manage
The Canon
We still treat some books as "originals" and others as "responses." Goh and Brown both complicate this order
Money and Stories
Foe's need to sell a plot reminds us that publishing is also an economy. Whose experience is "marketable" is a political question
I do not claim that today's world is the same as eighteenth-century empire. I only say that the questions of narration and power travel across centuries.
15. Personal Reflection
Before I read Foe, I believed that a narrator who tells you everything is a good narrator. Crusoe tells us dates, tools, fears and prayers. It felt complete. Friday's silence made me stop and ask what a complete story had left out.
Susan changed another habit. At first I read her as the person who "fixes" Defoe by speaking for the women he ignored. Then I noticed how often she wants Friday to behave according to her plan. That made me realise that being unheard in one way does not make someone innocent in another.
The thing I learned most — and the thing I still find hard to accept — is that a retelling is not automatically a repair. Reading Brown helped me see that the urge to "correct" a text can be a way of controlling it. Reading Goh helped me see that a story belongs to time, not to a single author. And reading Coetzee's Nobel Lecture, where two men pass each other "too busy even to wave" (Coetzee, "He and His Man"), made me think of the gap between any two writers — and between any writer and the person they write about.
16. Conclusion
When Robinson Crusoe is retold through Foe, the island stops being a stage for one man's success. It becomes a place where we ask who owns the land, who owns the words and who may tell the story.
🏝️ WHAT CHANGES — AND WHAT DOES NOT
Colonial Authority
Appears as something written — built through names, calendars and accounts
Friday's Silence
A wound, a refusal, a limit and a question — the book's most important sign
Susan Barton
Shows gender shapes who is believed — but no narrator is innocent
Labour & Property
Lose their heroic glow — Cruso's terraces produce only fear of idleness
Religion
Loses certainty — angel and cannibal cannot be told apart
Authorship
Becomes shared and uncertain — Defoe, Susan, Foe, Coetzee and the reader all take part
What does not change is the difficulty. Coetzee does not give Friday a voice and call it justice. He leaves us with a touch instead of a speech, and with the knowledge that we cannot fully recover what was silenced. For me, that honesty is the real achievement of Foe. It sends me back to Defoe with sharper questions, and I find that I read both books more carefully because of each other.
📺 Watch and Read
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2003/coetzee/lecture/
📚 Works Cited
"Altering a Legacy: Rewriting Defoe in J. M. Coetzee's Foe." MacSphere, McMaster University, macsphere.mcmaster.ca/handle/11375/12591.
Bertrand, Didier. "Order and Chaos in Paradise: Colonial and 'Postcolonial' Constructions of Religious Identity through the Robinson Crusoe Story." Religion & Literature, vol. 27, no. 3, 1995, pp. 29–51. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40059620.
Brown, Kieran. "Faux Apparitions: Angels or Cannibals, Between Coetzee and Defoe." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 66, no. 3, 2025, pp. 585–97, https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2024.2338829.
Coetzee, J. M. Foe. Penguin Books, 2015.
Coetzee, J. M. "He and His Man." Nobel Lecture, 7 Dec. 2003, NobelPrize.org, Nobel Prize Outreach, www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2003/coetzee/lecture/.
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Edited by Thomas Keymer, Oxford UP, 2007.
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. Edited by Michael Shinagel, 2nd ed., W. W. Norton, 1994.
Goh, Benjamin. "Postcolonial Temporality of J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986)." Law and Humanities, vol. 17, no. 1, 2023, pp. 112–38, https://doi.org/10.1080/17521483.2022.2148369.
"Robinson Crusoe Illustration." Mark Twain in His Times, University of Virginia, twain.lib.virginia.edu/wilson/slavery/crusoe.html.
"Why 'Man Friday' Wasn't Man Friday." Interesting Literature, 2026, interestingliterature.com/2026/06/man-friday-crusoe-name-meaning/.
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