292 Coetzee, J. M.
for bed, the reader is treated to a nighttime of silence
and beauty as the Magistrate takes his mat to the
rooftop to sleep. The Magistrate reflects on the
scene, adding that he has been here for a while, and
it seems he has grown complacent in this comfort-
able situation. However, the arrival of Colonel Joll
changes everything, and the Magistrate soon realizes
that Joll will impose both physical and psychological
cruelty in order to get the “truth.”
Two prisoners (an old man and a boy, “barbar-
ians” captured from a frontier raid) are interrogated
by Colonel Joll even though they have a plausible
excuse for their whereabouts. People within the bar-
racks report hearing screaming in the night, and in
the morning, when the Magistrate goes to check on
the prisoners, he finds that the old man is dead. The
idea that “pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt”
from his earlier conversation with Colonel Joll is
still fresh in his mind, and the Magistrate begins to
feel uneasy about the situation happening in his fort.
The Magistrate’s apprehension is not unfounded,
as Colonel Joll enlists most of the soldiers at the bar-
racks to go with him on a raid of the countryside.
Colonel Joll bases his decision for the raid on infor-
mation given to him by the boy, who, while enduring
extreme physical torture, has told Colonel Joll that
barbarian tribes are joining together to fight against
the empire. However, as the Magistrate discovers,
the boy has become very ill due to an untreated
wound, and the torture he has suffered during inter-
rogation has left him so weak that it seems he would
say almost anything to end the pain. Nevertheless,
Colonel Joll insists the boy come on the raid as a
guide, and to the Magistrate’s horror, prisoners from
the raids begin arriving back at the barracks only
four days after Colonel Joll leaves.
When Colonel Joll himself returns from the
raids, his interrogations continue. Five days go by,
and Colonel Joll tells the Magistrate he will leave.
Once Colonel Joll has gone, the Magistrate orders
the release of all prisoners and is appalled at the
conditions in which he finds the natives he knows
as simple “fishing people.” One girl in particular stirs
something in the Magistrate, and he offers her work
in order to keep her from being a vagrant or, perhaps,
in order to keep her from being seen as a reminder
of what Colonel Joll had done. It turns out that
during her interrogation, the girl’s torturers blinded
her in both eyes by forcing her to stare at the glow-
ing hot tines of a fork, and they broke both of her
ankles. The torture took place while the girl’s father
was forced to watch. The pain inflicted on the man’s
daughter would force the truth from him, in the
mind of Colonel Joll, but now the Magistrate realizes
that mental cruelty can be worse even than physical
cruelty because the girl’s father, powerless to help his
daughter, commits actions that lead to his death.
The worst is yet to come. A crisis of conscience
leads the Magistrate to undertake an arduous jour-
ney in which he returns the girl to her people. Upon
his return, he finds army troops waiting for him.
They remove him from his post and take him pris-
oner, charging him with treason. Through isolation
and misinformation, the Magistrate’s reputation
among the people at the barracks is seriously dam-
aged. He is imprisoned, beaten, and not allowed to
defend himself against any of the charges that are
leveled against him. At one point, he is even taken
outside and made to believe that he is about to be
hung. He is held aloft until the brink of death, then
released, crashing roughly to the ground. The com-
bination of physical and emotional torture suffered
by the Magistrate in front of the very people he used
to govern is the height of the empire’s cruelty, and he
no longer feels part of the empire.
Colin ChristopherisOlatiOn in Waiting for the Barbarians
J. M. Coetzee has long been regarded as a solitary,
reclusive person. Many of his novels contain char-
acters dealing with isolation of some sort: In Dusk-
lands, Jacobus Coetzee travels only with servants
whom he sees as little more than faithful animals;
in The Life & Times of Michael K, Michael K travels
alone and hardly ever speaks; and in Disgrace, David
Lurie refuses to see his own actions in the same
light that he sees the actions of others. The main
characters in Waiting for the Barbarians—the Mag-
istrate, the barbarian girl, and Colonel Joll—hold
true to this pattern of characters who are isolated
from something. However, it is the Magistrate, more
than any of the others, who is isolated from almost
everything around him.