➡️ Assignment- Paper No: 203
This Blog is an Assignment of paper no. 203: The postcolonial studies . In this assignment I am dealing with the topic : "Friday as the subaltern: The politics of silence"
🔷 Personal information:
Name: Gohel Dhruvika G.
Paper no: 203 The postcolonial studies
Subject code: 22408
Topic name: Friday as the subaltern: The politics of silence
Batch: M.A sem 3
Roll no: 04
Enrollment no: 5108240012
E-mailaddress: dhruvikagohel252@gmail.com
Submitted to: smt, S.B Gardi Department of English MKBU
🔷 Table of contents
1. Introduction
2. Postcolonial Framework: The Subaltern and the Question of Voice
3. Rewriting Empire: Coetzee’s Foe and the Colonial Narrative
4. Friday’s Silence: Symbolism and Resistance
5. The Author-Narrator Dynamic: Susan Barton and the Politics of Representation
6. The Silence of the Subaltern: Gayatri Spivak’s Lens
7. Language, Power, and Dehumanization
8. Silence as Survival and Resistance
9. The Ethics of Storytelling
10. Conclusion
11. References
🔷 About author
(J M Coetzee's)
J. M. Coetzee is a South African-born novelist, essayist, and literary critic known for his profound, often unsettling explorations of morality, power, and human suffering. Born in 1940 in Cape Town, he has gained international acclaim for works such as Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Life & Times of Michael K, which blend political critique with psychological depth. Coetzee’s spare yet powerful prose often reflects on issues like colonialism, apartheid, and the ethical responsibilities of writers and intellectuals. A two-time Booker Prize winner and Nobel Laureate in Literature (2003), Coetzee is celebrated for his intellectual rigor and moral seriousness, making him one of the most influential contemporary authors.
Friday as the subaltern: The politics of silence
1. Introduction
J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) reimagines Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe by retelling the story through the voice of Susan Barton, a female castaway who encounters Cruso and his tongueless servant, Friday. Through this narrative revision, Coetzee critiques the imperial and patriarchal assumptions embedded in colonial literature. Among the novel’s central concerns is Friday’s silence, which becomes a powerful metaphor for the historical silencing of the subaltern those marginalized by race, class, gender, and colonial domination. The character of Friday embodies the “subaltern” figure theorized by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose question “Can the subaltern speak?” resonates deeply within Coetzee’s text. This essay explores the politics of Friday’s silence, arguing that it functions not merely as absence or loss, but as a site of resistance, ambiguity, and ethical reflection on the limits of language and representation.
2. Postcolonial Framework: The Subaltern and the Question of Voice
Postcolonial theory, particularly through the works of Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Edward Said, interrogates how colonial discourse constructs and marginalizes the “Other.” The term subaltern originally used by Antonio Gramsci to describe groups excluded from hegemonic power was redefined by Spivak to refer to the colonized subject whose voice is systematically erased from dominant narratives. In her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), Spivak argues that even when the subaltern attempts to speak, their voice is mediated, distorted, or silenced by structures of colonial power and representation.
In Foe, Friday’s muteness literalizes this concept. His missing tongue renders him voiceless both physically and symbolically, encapsulating the broader historical erasure of enslaved and colonized peoples. Coetzee uses this condition not to reproduce the silencing but to force readers to confront it—to recognize the impossibility of full recovering or translating the subaltern voice within Western literary forms.
3. Rewriting Empire: Coetzee’s Foe and the Colonial Narrative
By rewriting Robinson Crusoe, Coetzee dismantles the triumphalist narrative of colonial adventure and human mastery. Defoe’s Crusoe, a symbol of European rationality and self-sufficiency, embodies the Enlightenment ideal of the colonial subject who “civilizes” the savage. Friday in Robinson Crusoe is taught language, religion, and servitude his voice shaped entirely by Crusoe’s authority.
Coetzee’s Foe reverses this logic. Here, Friday’s silence disrupts the continuity of the colonial myth. He cannot be assimilated into language or civilization; his muteness resists the narrator’s (and by extension, the reader’s) desire for comprehension and control. The island, once a space of imperial mastery, becomes a site of interpretive failure and ethical questioning.
4. Friday’s Silence: Symbolism and Resistance
Friday’s silence functions on multiple levels literal, political, and philosophical. On a literal level, his tongue has been cut out, a brutal act symbolizing the violence of colonial domination and the erasure of African identity. The mutilation of speech signifies how empire operates by silencing the colonized subject’s ability to narrate their own history.
Yet, Coetzee does not depict Friday’s silence as mere victimhood. Rather, it becomes a form of resistance a refusal to participate in the oppressor’s discourse. His silence defies the interpretive authority of Susan Barton and the writer Foe, who both attempt to impose meaning and coherence on his unknowable story. In refusing to “speak,” Friday denies them the comfort of closure, reminding readers that some histories remain irretrievably lost.
5. The Author-Narrator Dynamic: Susan Barton and the Politics of Representation
Susan Barton serves as a mediating figure between Friday and Foe. As a woman struggling to have her story written, she herself faces marginalization within a patriarchal literary structure. However, her attempts to give Friday a “voice” often replicate colonial authority. She insists on interpreting his gestures and silences, projecting her own meanings onto him:
> “Friday has no command of words and therefore no defense against being reshaped in words.”
This dynamic mirrors how colonial discourse “speaks for” the colonized rather than allowing them to speak for themselves. Barton’s well-intentioned efforts ultimately underscore the impossibility of transparent representation the subaltern cannot be fully recovered or understood within the master’s language. Coetzee thus exposes the limits of both feminist and humanist attempts to “recover” the Other without interrogating the politics of narrative mediation.
6. The Silence of the Subaltern: Gayatri Spivak’s Lens
Spivak’s argument that “the subaltern cannot speak” provides a vital theoretical framework for understanding Friday’s silence. Spivak does not mean that the subaltern lacks thoughts or agency, but that their speech is rendered unintelligible within the structures of colonial discourse. Their voice, even when expressed, cannot be heard as authentic or self-determined.
In Foe, every attempt to make Friday speak through Barton’s questions, through writing, or through gestures fails. His silence is not simply a void but an indictment of the representational systems that claim to “give voice.” Friday’s absence of speech forces readers to confront their own interpretive desires, to ask why we insist on hearing the subaltern only in terms we can understand.
7. Language, Power, and Dehumanization
Language in Foe functions as both a medium of control and a marker of humanity. In colonial ideology, speech and reason were used to distinguish “man” from “beast,” thereby justifying slavery and conquest. Friday’s lack of speech dehumanizes him in the eyes of others, positioning him as an object rather than a subject.
However, Coetzee subverts this binary by showing that language itself can be complicit in violence. The colonizer’s language English becomes an instrument of domination, a tool through which history is written and rewritten. Friday’s silence, therefore, reveals the moral bankruptcy of language as a transparent medium of truth. His muteness exposes how communication, when structured by power, becomes an act of erasure rather than understanding.
8. Silence as Survival and Resistance
While silence may seem to represent loss, it also carries the potential for resistance and survival. Friday’s muteness protects a private space that the colonizers cannot invade. His refusal or inability to articulate his story prevents his past from being rewritten by colonial authority. In this sense, silence becomes a shield, an assertion of identity beyond language.
Coetzee’s portrayal of Friday invites readers to rethink silence not as emptiness but as a different form of expression. As Homi Bhabha notes, mimicry and ambivalence are strategies through which the colonized resist domination. Similarly, Friday’s silence destabilizes the power of the colonizer’s discourse, leaving open a haunting uncertainty that resists assimilation into narrative closure.
9. The Ethics of Storytelling
At the heart of Foe lies an ethical dilemma: who has the right to tell another’s story? Coetzee positions the reader alongside Susan Barton and Foe, confronting us with our complicity in the desire to “know” the subaltern. The novel’s fragmented narrative, shifting perspectives, and unresolved ending prevent any single authoritative interpretation.
By refusing to translate Friday’s silence into speech, Coetzee resists the temptation of appropriation. The final, haunting image of the novel where the narrator enters a shipwreck and imagines Friday’s body underwater, his mouth opening and closing without sound captures both the impossibility and the necessity of listening to the silenced. It is an ethical call to humility, acknowledging that some histories and traumas cannot be spoken, only witnessed.
10. Conclusion
Friday’s silence in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe epitomizes the politics of subalternity and the ethical limits of representation. His tongueless state dramatizes the violence of colonialism, the erasure of indigenous voices, and the complicity of language in systems of domination. Yet, Coetzee transforms this silence into a space of resistance a reminder that the subaltern, though silenced, continues to haunt the narrative frameworks that seek to contain them. Through Friday, Coetzee confronts readers with the uncomfortable truth that Western literature cannot simply “recover” the subaltern voice; it must first confront the violence of its own interpretive acts. Friday does not speak but in his silence, he exposes the deepest fault lines of history, language, and power.
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