Waiting for the Barbarians

In the striking opening sentence of Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), the Magistrate’s attention is drawn to the dark sunglasses worn by his sinister military visitor, Colonel Joll: ‘I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire’. 1 The Magistrate cannot see Joll’s eyes hidden behind the reflective glasses, pointing here, at the outset, to a larger problem of optical non-reciprocity in Coetzee’s third novel. The opening sentence’s problematisation of the pronomial ‘I’, which simultaneously also points to his unseeing eye, needs to be read in conjunction with the Magistrate’s enigmatic remark at the ending of the novel: ‘There is something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it’ (155).