Symbol Of Empire-A Postcolonial Study Of Coetzee’s Waiting For The Barbarians

J.M. Coetzee is a famous novelist, essayist and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. Waiting for the Barbarians is one of his masterpieces. The story happens in an uncertain frontier town which is dominated by the Third Bureau. The Third Bureau under the name of civil guard starts to hunt the “dangerous barbarians”. When read about “barbarian”, one could not help to associate it with its antonym—“civilized”. However, who are barbarians and who are actually civilized? Coetzee has given his answers in this symbolic novel. This thesis will try to decode those empire symbols from the perspective of postcolonial study. Empire symbols in this story become the important media which connect surface meaning and its implication.This thesis will be divided into five chapters. The first chapter includes an introduction to J.M. Coetzee and Waiting for the Barbarians, international and domestic studies on this novel and the theoretical framework being used in this thesis. Chapter Two is a discussion on the following symbols: Colonel Joll’s eyeglasses, stout cane, torturer, prisoners and Magistrate’s repeating snow dreams, his washing of the barbarian girl. Chapter Three deals with the symbol of the other, the identity of Magistrate ambiguous other, the barbarians’ marginalized other and Joll’s incursive other. Chapter Four uses Foucault’s theory of discourse and try to decode the symbols of empire power discourse. The last chapter is a conclusion.Through a detailed discussion of the symbols in the novel, this thesis concludes that Coetzee reveals the cruelty of empire in his writing, at the same time he gives his answers to the question of what is civilization in this symbolic text.