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Waiting for the Barbarians as a Bildungsroman

Corresponding Author : Dr. Muhammad Alamgir Toimoor (mtoimoor@gamail.com)

Keywords : Magistrate, empire, civilization, violence, torture

Abstract :

J. M. Coetzee, in his Waiting for the Barbarians, seems to have described in detailed the modus operandi of an imaginary empire. In order to survive, the empire capitalizes on violence and intimidation - two prongs of a fork with what the empire feeds upon not only on its natives but also on its own subjects. At the outset of the novel, the protagonist, a magistrate at a distant outpost of the empire, appears to be a loyal and self-righteous employee who, as a part of the imperial governance, is one of the beneficiaries of the imperial aka colonial enterprise. As a self-righteous man, he seems to have been oblivious of the harrowing violence, torture, and sheer intimidation by means of which the empire or colonization he serves ensures its existence and sway. This self-denial of the magistrate as to coming face to face and acknowledging the evil nature of his own government gradually veers away in the thin desert air of the imperial outpost when he himself becomes subject to traumatic bodily harms for siding with what he calls “humanity” on behalf of the nomads alias natives or the barbarians. The author of this paper has focused on the incarceration, corporeal abuse, and the de - humanizing of the magistrate at the hands of the Third Bureau of the Civil Guard armed forces to prove that this universal practice of the imperial force eventually fills him with infallible insights that the empire by nature is brutal, inhuman, treacherous, and barbarous. The magistrate’s recognition of this fact accepting the Stark reality is what the author has termed as Bildungsroman, a German word, which broadly means coming of age. The paper further focuses on the proposition that an imperial or colonizing power is not only hostile to the natives but also is equally malicious to its own subjects when it comes to violence and generating fear and that the empire is working for its subjects’ welfare and ensuring peace for everyone are a sham.

Published on December 31st, 2019 in Vol 30, No 2, Humanities