The Undiscovered Self: An Interpretation Of Waiting For The Barbarians From The Perspective Of Collective Unconscious

Regarded as one of South Africa’s most accomplished contemporary novelists, Coetzee examines the effects of racism and colonial oppression in his works. Waiting for the Barbarians is his third novel, which is first published in 1980. This novel becomes evident that the politics of colonization constitutes a recurrent theme in his fiction. But my thesis does not focus on this theme; it will attempt to make an interpretation from the perspective of collective unconscious.According to Jung(1991), the collective unconscious is a part of the psyche which can be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious. And the collective unconscious is inherited from a person’s ancestral past and consists of pre-existence forms. These forms are archetypes which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents. In addition, person is predispositions for experiencing and responding to the world in the same ways that his ancestors did. And this kind of unconscious is not only shared by a few individuals but also by all humankind. Based on Jung’s theory, this thesis makes an interpretation of collective unconscious reflected in the novel by associating with some archetypes to explore the characters’ self.The whole thesis consists of six parts. The first part is an introduction. It gives a general introduction to J. M. Coetzee and a plot summary of Waiting for the Barbarians. The second part will make a literature review on Waiting for the Barbarians. It consists of international studies and domestic studies. The third part is the theoretical framework and critical approach. In this part, Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and archetype will be discussed. The next two parts are the focus of this thesis. The fourth part is divided into two points to discuss why and how people lose the self. Firstly, it will focus on common psychic predisposition toward the unknown. Secondly, taking those common psychic predispositions as the background, it will then discuss the self from the angle of persona and shadow. The fifth part concentrates on the undiscovered self of one’s inner world, using the Magistrate as an example. This part will be divided into two points: dream and the barbarian girl. The last part is the conclusion.At the end of the thesis, it can be concluded that knowing oneself is an everlasting task for human beings. Because of the most mystic world—unconsciousness, it is more difficult for us to know ourselves. But if we want to have a healthy life, we must learn to know ourselves.