Foe by J M Coetzee

This blog is created as part of the Thinking Activity for Unit 2 on J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, from Paper No. 203 – The Postcolonial Studies. Both Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Coetzee’s Foe deal with the idea of human life and survival on a deserted island, though they were written in different historical periods.

Comparative and Critical Analysis of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe and Foe by J.M. Coetzee

Introduction

Both Robinson Crusoe and Foe stage life on an island to explore human existence, but they arrive at very different moral and political conclusions. Defoe’s novel helped produce an eighteenth-century narrative of enterprise, property, and colonial mastery. Coetzee’s Foe is a postcolonial, metafictional response that unsettles Defoe’s authority — rewriting the story to expose silenced voices, question the legitimacy of the colonial text, and interrogate who gets to tell history.

1. Intertextuality and Parody: How Foe speaks to Crusoe

Coetzee’s Foe is explicitly intertextual: it re-works characters and situations from Defoe but displaces and revises them. By changing Defoe → “Foe,” Crusoe → “Cruso,” and inserting Susan Barton and the writer Mr Foe, Coetzee stages a parody that is also a critique: imitation with a distance that exposes the ideological assumptions of the original. This parody unsettles the claim of a single authoritative narrative and foregrounds the act of storytelling as political.

2. Island as Space: Possession versus Appropriation

In Robinson Crusoe, the island functions as a site of mastery: Crusoe imposes labour, property relations, and a European order on the land—his survival is bound up with appropriation and the projection of Englishness onto an empty (for him) space. Defoe’s island narrative thus models colonial occupation as rational, civilizing work. Foe problematizes this. Coetzee reframes the island as a contested space where claims of ownership, language, and history are exposed as constructed rather than natural. The island becomes a testing ground for questions about who may speak, who remains voiceless, and whose story is recorded.

3. Crusoe / Cruso: Hero or Proto-Colonizer?

Defoe’s Crusoe is often read as homo economicus — industrious, rational, an emblem of bourgeois enterprise and English national identity. He exemplifies an ideology that links labour, self-improvement, and empire. Coetzee’s Cruso, however, is deflated and ambiguous; he is not a triumphant colonial founder but a figure whose authority is questioned by the presence of Susan Barton and the writer Mr Foe. The transformation highlights how the “hero” of the original is a product of narrative framing. 

4. Friday and Voicelessness: Representation and Silencing

Friday in Defoe is represented within the master–servant logic: assimilated, named, and instructed by Crusoe — a symbol of colonial domination and cultural dispossession. Coetzee’s Foe radicalizes the question of Friday’s voice by literalizing his voicelessness: Friday is an object of competing narratives and a figure who cannot speak for himself within the novel’s structures. Susan Barton attempts to provide an account of Friday, but the novel insists on the impossibility of fully recovering the colonized subject’s autonomous voice. This is Coetzee’s central ethical and political provocation: a critique of appropriation under the guise of “giving voice.”

5. Authorship, Authority, and the Ethics of Storytelling

Foe foregrounds authorship as a site of power. Mr Foe (the writer) claims authority to shape and publish the island story; Susan Barton’s attempts to tell her experience are mediated, edited, or overridden. Coetzee thus questions the narrator/author’s right to transform lived suffering into literary property. Where Defoe’s narrative performs confident historical and ideological claims, Coetzee’s metafictional strategy reveals those claims as artifice — urging readers to interrogate how literary forms participate in colonial knowledge production. 

6. Nationalism and the “Imagined Community”

Scholarly work has argued that Robinson Crusoe participated in the formation of an English national imagination — shaping ideals of Englishness, self-sufficiency, and civilizational superiority. Coetzee’s Foe operates as a deconstruction of that imagined community: it destabilizes the narratives that legitimize European dominance and shows how language constructs national myths. By rewriting the canonical island tale, Coetzee invites readers to rethink cultural memory and to expose Eurocentrism as a linguistic and narrative construction. 

7. Narrative Form: Realism versus Metafiction

Defoe’s realist strategies (diary-like forms, pragmatic detail) produce verisimilitude and normative moral lessons about labour and providence. Coetzee employs metafiction — self-reflexive narration, narrative gaps, and irony — to call attention to the text’s artifice. This formal shift is not mere experimentation; it is political. Metafiction foregrounds silences, omissions, and ethical limits of representation, making the reader complicit in questioning canonical authority. 

8. Ethics, Empathy, and the Limits of Representation

Both novels engage ethical questions about human existence under extreme conditions, but their moral orientations differ. Defoe’s emphasis is on moral improvement, providence, and civil order. Coetzee’s novel raises unsettling questions: Can an author ethically “speak for” the oppressed? Does rewriting a canonical text repair or reproduce injustice? Coetzee’s unresolved tensions—especially around Friday—suggest that ethical representation may be permanently incomplete, inviting reflective humility rather than triumphant closure. 

Conclusion

Taken together, Robinson Crusoe and Foe form a productive dialogue across centuries. Defoe’s novel constructs island life as a stage for colonial mastery and the production of national ideals; Coetzee’s Foe rewrites that stage to expose the epistemic violence of such storytelling. Coetzee’s intervention is both literary and political: a refusal to let the original’s authority pass unexamined and a demand that readers confront the ethical implications of narrating others. The comparative study thus reveals how form, character, and narrative authority shape meanings about empire, voice, and historical memory.

References 

Amlinger, Marc Alexander. Daniel Defoe’s "Robinson Crusoe" and J.M. Coetzee’s "Foe": Colonial Imagination and Its Postcolonial Deconstruction. GRIN Verlag, 2010. https://www.grin.com/document/120711.

Coetzee, J. M. Foe. Penguin Books, 2010.

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Fingerprint! Classics, 2018.

Finke, Luise A. Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" and J.M. Coetzee's "Foe": Characters in Comparison. GRIN Verlag, 2007. https://www.grin.com/document/21433.

Han, Wenju. “Construction and Deconstruction of Imagined Community—A Comparative Study of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe in Light of Nationalism.” Journal of Language Teaching and Research, vol. 8, no. 6, 2017, pp. 1080–1085. Academy Publication, https://www.academypublication.com/issues2/jltr/vol08/06/15.pdf

“[Article Title Unknown].” Taylor & Francis Online, Routledge, 2016. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13825577.2016.1183422.