Waiting for the Barbarians 293The Magistrate sets himself apart from Colonel
Joll, the outsider who has come to his settlement,
in the very first sentence of the novel: “I have never
seen anything like it” (1). Of course, the Magistrate
is only talking about Colonel Joll’s sunglasses, but
the tone is set. He soon finds himself at odds with
Joll’s interrogation techniques as well as his inten-
tions to raid the frontier. Joll hopes to capture more
prisoners so he can gain information about the
barbarians’ plans; meanwhile, the Magistrate wishes
Joll would leave well enough alone so that the fron-
tier settlement could go back to its quiet, idyllic
existence. Throughout most of the interrogations,
Joll has the willing assistance of the Magistrate’s
men. The Magistrate questions these men about
what happens during the interrogations, and they
usually give him an account that sounds very much
like something Joll told them to say. Sometimes the
Magistrate gets them to admit to something else
that happened through indirect questioning, but it is
clear that Joll has specifically provided a story for the
men to tell because he sees the Magistrate as little
more than a hindrance to the job he must perform.
The true vastness of the Magistrate’s isolation
from all he has known is apparent during one of
his visits to the ruins he has been excavating in the
desert. He has heard children’s stories about the
ghosts who inhabit the ruins during a certain hour
of each night, and he wishes to see or hear the ghosts
for himself. He notices everything as the sky grows
darker and listens for every sound that might signal
the arrival of the spirits, but the only sign he recog-
nizes is “the patter of sand driving from nowhere to
nowhere across the wastes,” and soon he falls asleep.
The Magistrate, as he leaves the desert to go back
to the settlement, thinks to himself, “How fortunate
that no one sees me!,” realizing how foolish he has
been, sitting out in the desert and listening for
ghosts, based solely on the stories of children. After
all, no adults would tell him about ghosts in the des-
ert. Indeed, throughout the novel, most adults avoid
contact with the Magistrate, unless they are servants
responding to direct orders.
Even the barbarian girl, whom the Magistrate
thinks he is becoming very close to, rebuffs him
in the end. He realizes that he cannot know what
is going on in her mind but deludes himself into
thinking that she cares for and has grown depen-
dent on him. Even the reader does not know why
the girl allows him to wash her each night, yet she
does. She accepts the job he has given her and stays
under the roof he has offered to her. However, at
the first opportunity she is given to return to her
home, she jumps at the chance. The Magistrate
asks her to return with him of her own free will,
and she responds bluntly: “Why? No. I do not want
to go back to that place.” On the trip back to the
settlement, and throughout the rest of the novel, the
Magistrate can only put together bits and pieces of
what the barbarian girl looks like until, at the end,
another woman tells him that both she and the bar-
barian girl always felt he was “somewhere else” when
he was with them.
Finally, a reader of Waiting for the Barbarians
must consider the isolation imposed by the story’s
setting. Not only is the settlement in the desert, but
the inhabitants seem unaware of the outside world.
(Consider how foreign a pair of sunglasses seemed
to the Magistrate at the beginning.) In addition, the
empire is given no name or geographical location.
Coetzee does very few things by accident in his
writing, and here he isolates the story in place and
time. Much is left open to the reader’s interpretation
in Coetzee’s novels, but the isolation of both the
story and the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbar-
ians is unquestionable.
Colin Christopherrace in Waiting for the Barbarians
Although race seems to be an overriding factor in
most of J. M. Coetzee’s works, it is hardly, if ever,
mentioned. It is almost as if Coetzee makes a con-
scious decision not to talk about race, and Waiting
for the Barbarians is no exception to this pattern.
For a long time, Coetzee lived and worked in his
native South Africa, and so it is easy for a reader of
his novels to assume that his settings are African.
Given what is known of South Africa’s recent his-
tory, a reader may also assume that Coetzee’s themes
specifically refer to race.
In Waiting for the Barbarians, however, race can
only be assumed by the reader. In the beginning
of the story, the Magistrate is talking to a prisoner
in front of Colonel Joll, and the prisoner’s face is