1. “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.”
- Cavafy (1904)
Maulik Bhadreshkumar Bhatt,
M.A. Part – II, Sem – IV,
Roll No - 03
Paper – E-E-405-D- The African Literature,
Unit – 03 – Waiting for the Barbarians,
Department of English,
Bhavnagar University.
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2.  Self – Other Binary
 Magistrate / Colonel Joll
 Excavation of the nearby ruin of a former civilization
 Enigmatic washing and oiling “ritual” with a naked barbarian girl
 Alterity is Inter-subjective for him
 Self and other – inseparable – if distinct
Mikhail Bakhtin‟s view – self-other interdependence and interanimation
“I am conscious of myself only while revealing myself to another, through another, and
with the help of another… A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and
always on the boundary; looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with
the eyes of another… I cannot manage without another, I cannot become myself without
another; I must find myself in another by finding another in myself” (Shaffer, 134)
 Mutual reflection and mutual acceptance
 In order to understand – Locate outside – time, space and culture
 Life is Dialogical – to dialogue/commune
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3.  Magistrate‟s relationship with a Barbarian Girl linked with that of Third Bureau‟s.
 Both trying to „trespass into the forbidden‟
 Girl – Indecipherable – unreadable – obscure – opaque – blank – incomplete
“There is only blankness and desolation that that there has to be such blankness”
(Coetzee, 79)
 Magistrate – A man who has lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may
lead nowhere.
Anatomizes the difficulty faced by even the most well-intentioned Self in in
understanding and valuing the other
The empire projects its own barbarism onto the other beyond the borders
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4. References:
Cavafy, Constantine P. Waiting for the Barbarians, 1904, Print.
Coetzee, J.M., Waiting for the Barbarians, 79. 1980, Print.
Shaffer, W. Brian., Reading the Novel in English, 121-137, 2006, Print.
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