Allegorical Ruins: Narrative Hieroglyphics in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

Abstract: This essay revisits the ethics of failure in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). The novel's narrator, a colonial magistrate, fails to impose a liberal humanist narrative of reconciliation onto the barbarian girl, a racialized native. While much scholarship has focused on this failure, I argue that the novel's self-reflexive fragmentation of its allegorical narrative invites readers to see its stylized and opaque fragments as allegorical signs in themselves—hieroglyphs revealing a political message of community in a visual rather than a narrative form. Drawing on Walter Benjamin and Roman Jakobson, my method of interpretation shifts the locus of the novel's allegorical enunciation from the magistrate to the barbarian girl, demonstrating how the novel's formal innovation is imbricated with its ethical and political concerns.