Waiting For The Barbarians Essay

The Empire in which J.M. Coetzee creates within his Nobel-Prize winning novel, “Waiting for the Barbarians”, is home to a people who believe themselves to be more “civilized” and “proper” than those who are not as technologically advanced as them. As noted from the passage on page 51 of the novel, it is through constant acts of swindling, degrading, and bullying, as the narrator (the magistrate) describes it, that the “uncivilized”, or the “Barbarians”, are treated with as much disregard for dirt by the people of the Empire. The magistrate is well aware of the mistreatment of the barbarians and seeks to express his unpopular opinions of good hope and respect for the barbarians within the form of a lengthy spiel to another. The person whom is …show more content…
To “see who gets short-weighted and cheated and shouted at and bullied” (51), to “see who is forced to leave his womenfolk...for fear they will be insulted by soldiers” (51). At a brief glance, this all may just seem to be examples of barbarian mistreatment, a tug on the readers ethos and pathos achieved through Coetzee’s superior writing skills, but there is so much more to be said than what appears on the mere surface.
There is an emphasis here, an emphasis on sight and not just any particular character’s sight, but every character within the novel. A clear point is trying to be made here, a point that insinuates the idea that the people who are not the barbarians, the ones who call themselves “civilized” people of the Empire, are lacking vision. Not in a literal sense, but rather the vision of empathy, understanding, and patience required to relate and treat kindly a human being who, despite not following your way of life, is still someone worthy of respect and value. Such vision is nonexistent within the Empire’s people, even in the Magistrate within the beginning of the novel. He, too, was victim to blindness, averting his eyes and feigning ignorance of the suffering the misjudged