Rewriting Robinson Crusoe

Born a South Afrikaner in a white physique, John Maxwell Coetzee is naturally endowed with the facility to ponder on the postcolonial issues especially in the height of apartheid. With humanistic concern for the mentally repressed and socially disparaged, along with keen observation of life and human psychology, Coetzee finally got the supreme acknowledgement in the literary domain. As an innovative and provocative novelist, essayist and literary critic, Coetzee gained international recognition early in his career and was the first writer to receive the United Kingdom's Booker Prize twice. For Disgrace, the Swedish Academy awarded Coetzee the Nobel Prize for Literature, and praised his works for what it called their well-crafted composition and analytical brilliance. Nourished on the African continent, his concern has never truly deviated from the postcolonial theme; meanwhile, assisted by his dexterous application of postmodernist techniques, his works are recognized as masterpieces worthy of elaborated study.This thesis is focusing on Foe, which in many ways demonstrates itself to be a rewritten work of Robinson Crusoe, the canonic work with the connotation of exalting colonial exploration. Written at the height of the apartheid era, this novel testifies to the suffering engendered by apartheid precisely by refusing to translate that suffering into a factual narrative. Rather than providing a direct historical relation of the history of apartheid, Coetzee's narratives instead provide a way of relating to such a history. The novel incorporates spectral presences into its narratives in order to bear witness to histories of racial oppression. This thesis is trying to anatomize Foe through the writing techniques—the unequivocal postmodernist devices, including deconstruction of authorial authority, metafiction, rewriting, historiographic metafiction, indefiniteness—to help understand how Coetzee managed to assail colonialism between lines in Foe, one work previously thought by some critics as a divergence from the South African background. Coetzee's position as a white South African produces an insurmountable gap between his privileged narrators and the figures of alterity whose histories the narrators wish to relate. That constitutes the primary focus of Foe and the utmost quest of the protagonist—Susan, who is making incessant efforts to make her story recorded truthfully and to enlighten Friday so that the enslaved could make their voice heard and the true history could be revealed. Foe surmounted the inherent difficulty in speaking of a language that has not been allowed to exist, describing a continent that has not been explored, questing a mystery that has never been disclosed—the real history. What is essentially Coetzee's premise in Foe is that all of history, and therefore all of literature, would demand retelling.