WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS by J.M. Coetzee for international examinations at IB, A‑Level, AP.
This comprehensive study guide for J.M. Coetzee’s Nobel Prize‑winning novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) is designed to support your preparation for international examinations at IB, A‑Level, AP, and equivalent levels. Each section provides rigorous analysis of the novel’s contexts, literary techniques, and interpretive possibilities, written in a detailed descriptive prose style that models the sustained critical argument examiners reward.
About the Author – J.M. Coetzee
John Maxwell Coetzee was born on 9 February 1940 in Cape Town, South Africa, to Afrikaner parents. His father was a lawyer and government employee; his mother was a schoolteacher. Coetzee grew up speaking Afrikaans at home and English at school – a bilingual upbringing that would later inform his complex relationship with the language and politics of his homeland. He attended the University of Cape Town, earning degrees in English and mathematics, before moving to the United Kingdom in 1962, where he worked as a computer programmer for IBM in London – an unlikely apprenticeship for a future Nobel laureate. He then pursued graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin, completing a PhD in linguistics on the subject of Samuel Beckett’s prose style. This training in structuralist linguistics and his deep engagement with Beckett’s minimalist aesthetic would profoundly shape his own literary voice.
Coetzee is also an acclaimed literary critic and translator. His critical works include White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988), Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (1992), and The Lives of Animals (1999). He has translated Dutch poetry and the works of Cees Nooteboom. In 2002, he emigrated to Australia, where he became a citizen and accepted a position at the University of Adelaide. He has since published several more novels, including Elizabeth Costello (2003), Slow Man (2005), Diary of a Bad Year (2007), The Childhood of Jesus (2013), and The Pole (2023). Despite his relocation, South Africa remains a haunting presence in his work.
Part Two: Part‑Wise Detailed Summary
Waiting for the Barbarians is divided into three parts, each tracing a stage in the Magistrate’s moral awakening and subsequent destruction. The novel is narrated in the first person by the Magistrate himself, an unreliable but deeply introspective voice whose perceptions gradually shift as events unfold.
Part One opens in an unnamed frontier settlement of an unspecified Empire. The Magistrate, who has served for decades as the town’s civil administrator, describes his comfortable, routine existence. He collects taxes, administers justice, and occasionally trades with the nomadic “barbarians” who live beyond the borders. His hobby is archaeology: he excavates the ruins of an ancient civilisation that once flourished in the area, unearthing wooden slips inscribed with a script he cannot decipher. His life is peaceful, almost idyllic, and he looks forward to a quiet retirement.
This tranquillity is shattered by the arrival of Colonel Joll, an officer from the Third Bureau – the Empire’s secret police. Joll wears dark sunglasses, which the Magistrate finds unsettling and strange. Joll has been sent to investigate rumours of a barbarian uprising. Despite the Magistrate’s assurances that the nomads are peaceful traders and fishermen, Joll insists on conducting interrogations. Two prisoners – an old man and his young nephew – are brought in. They are fishermen, not warriors, but Joll tortures them anyway, locking the boy in a cell with the old man’s corpse to break his spirit. The boy eventually confesses to whatever Joll wants to hear.
Joll then organises a punitive expedition into the desert, using the tortured boy as a guide. He returns with a group of captured barbarians, roped together through holes cut in their hands. In a grotesque public spectacle, Joll has the prisoners stripped, smeared with dust, and labelled “enemy” on their backs with charcoal. The townspeople are invited to beat them. A young girl is pushed forward and encouraged to strike one of the prisoners, which she does to applause. The Magistrate watches in horror but does nothing.
After Joll departs, the Magistrate visits the prisoners in their cells. He finds them starving, filthy, and dying. Among them is a young barbarian woman, semi‑blind from torture, with damaged feet that make walking difficult. He orders the soldiers to clean the barracks and provide food and water. When the prisoners are eventually released, the girl remains behind, begging in the streets. The Magistrate takes her into his home, first as a servant, then as a companion. He develops a strange ritual: each night he washes her feet and legs, massaging them with oil, trying to erase the marks of torture. Their relationship is not sexual – the Magistrate feels no desire for her – yet it is intensely intimate. He is obsessed with the scars on her body, reading them as a text of imperial violence. She remains largely silent, her thoughts and feelings inaccessible to him.
Part Two follows the Magistrate’s growing alienation from the Empire. He decides to return the barbarian girl to her people, a journey that will take him across the desert into forbidden territory. He assembles a small party: two soldiers, a pack mule, and the girl. The journey is arduous – they face sandstorms, freezing nights, and dwindling supplies. Along the way, the Magistrate and the girl finally become lovers, though the encounter is described with clinical detachment. When they reach the edge of the Empire’s territory, he sends the girl ahead with the soldiers, then returns alone.
Back in the settlement, the Magistrate finds that Joll has returned with a new officer, Mandel, and a larger force. The Empire is now in full paranoid mode, convinced of an imminent barbarian attack. The Magistrate is accused of treason: he has consorted with the enemy, helped a barbarian escape, and written a critical letter to the capital. He is stripped of his position, beaten, and thrown into the same cell where the barbarian prisoners once suffered. Mandel subjects him to torture: he is force‑fed salt water, hung by his wrists, and left in the cold. The townspeople, who once respected him, now jeer. He is dressed in a woman’s smock and hung from a tree in the public square, a figure of ridicule.
Part Three describes the Magistrate’s imprisonment and eventual release. He is held for months, his health deteriorating. The Empire’s expedition into the desert fails: the barbarians lead the soldiers on a wild chase, then vanish. The troops become demoralised, desertions mount, and supplies run low. Joll and Mandel eventually abandon the settlement, leaving the Magistrate in charge of a broken, starving town. He tries to restore order but finds that his authority is gone. The townspeople have lost faith in everything. The novel ends ambiguously: the Magistrate sits in his office, trying to write a history of the settlement, but he cannot remember the events clearly. He has a final dream of children playing in the snow – a recurring image throughout the novel – but the children melt away when he approaches. The last lines suggest that winter is coming, and he is waiting – for what, he does not know.
The novel’s title refers to Cavafy’s poem, in which a city waits for barbarians who never arrive. Coetzee’s barbarians are also absent for most of the narrative; they exist primarily as a figment of the Empire’s fearful imagination. The real barbarians, the novel suggests, are the torturers themselves.
Major Themes – Imperialism, Fear, and the Invention of the Other
The most pervasive theme in Waiting for the Barbarians is the critique of imperialism – not as a historical phenomenon specific to South Africa, but as a universal structure of power that operates through fear, othering, and self‑deception. Coetzee’s Empire is never named, never located in a specific time or place, yet its mechanisms are instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with colonial history. The Empire defines itself against an imagined enemy: the barbarians. Without barbarians, the Empire would have no justification for its military expansion, its secret police, or its torture chambers. The barbarians are, in the most literal sense, a necessary fiction.
The Magistrate, in his early complacency, is a perfect representative of the Empire’s everyday face. He does not personally torture anyone; he simply administers the town, collects taxes, and looks forward to retirement. He tells himself that he is a good man, a civilised man. But his very ordinariness is the novel’s sharpest indictment of imperialism. The Empire does not require fanatics like Colonel Joll to function; it requires the quiet complicity of thousands of ordinary people who look away, who follow orders, who prefer peace and quiet to moral confrontation. The Magistrate’s hobby – digging up the ruins of a dead civilisation – is a metaphor for his relationship to history. He is fascinated by the past but powerless to change the present. He can decipher ancient scripts but cannot read the marks of torture on a living body.
The concept of “othering” is central to the novel’s political argument. The Empire constructs the barbarians as everything it is not: primitive, violent, treacherous, subhuman. This negative definition allows the Empire to see itself as civilised, peaceful, and righteous. But the novel systematically inverts these categories. The barbarians we actually meet – the old fisherman, his nephew, the girl – are gentle, long‑suffering, and entirely undeserving of their fate. The real savagery is performed by Colonel Joll, Mandel, and the soldiers who beat prisoners in public spectacles. The Empire projects its own violence onto the other, then claims to be defending itself against that violence. This is the classic logic of colonial paranoia, which Coetzee exposes as both hypocritical and self‑destructive.
Fear is the engine that drives this machinery. The Empire fears the barbarians not because they pose any real threat – they do not – but because fear is politically useful. Fear justifies torture. Fear justifies the suspension of ordinary legal and moral norms. Fear transforms ordinary citizens into willing participants in atrocity. When the townspeople are invited to beat the barbarian prisoners, they do so not because they hate the prisoners but because they are afraid of what might happen if they refuse. The girl who is pushed forward to strike a prisoner is a particularly chilling example: she is performing her loyalty to the Empire under duress, but the act itself implicates her in the violence. Coetzee shows that fear is contagious and that complicity can be manufactured through terror.
The novel also explores how fear distorts perception. Colonel Joll wears dark sunglasses, a symbol of his refusal to see clearly. He tortures prisoners not to discover the truth but to confirm what he already believes. He is blind to the innocence of the fishermen, blind to the humanity of the barbarians, blind to his own cruelty. The Magistrate, by contrast, gradually learns to see – but only after he has been blinded himself. When he is hung from the tree with a hood over his head, he experiences what the barbarian girl experienced: the inability to return the gaze, the reduction to a passive object. His physical blindness becomes a metaphor for his earlier moral blindness.
The novel’s treatment of truth is equally subversive. Colonel Joll believes that torture produces truth: that a victim who is pushed to the breaking point will finally confess. But the confessions Joll extracts are worthless – they are whatever the victim thinks Joll wants to hear. The boy who is tortured into guiding the expedition leads the soldiers into the desert and then abandons them. The “truth” Joll obtains is a fantasy, a projection of his own paranoia. The Magistrate, in his own way, is also obsessed with truth. He wants to decipher the ancient scripts, to understand the barbarian girl’s body, to write a true history of the settlement. But he discovers that truth is elusive, that the past cannot be recovered, that even his own memories are unreliable. The novel ends not with a revelation but with uncertainty: winter is coming, the children in the snow melt away, and the Magistrate waits for something he cannot name.
Character Analysis –
The Magistrate
The Magistrate is the novel’s narrator and central consciousness. He is never given a name; he is identified only by his role. This anonymity is deliberate: Coetzee wants him to be representative, not exceptional. He is the ordinary man, the civil servant, the bureaucrat who keeps the Empire running through his quiet efficiency. He is also, as the novel progresses, a man of conscience – or at least a man who develops a conscience. His arc is not a simple transformation from evil to good but a painful, incomplete, and ultimately tragic process of awakening.
When we first meet the Magistrate, he is complacent, comfortable, and self‑satisfied. He has served the Empire for decades and expects to retire soon. He describes his life with a kind of ironic detachment, as if he is already a character in a story. His hobby – excavating ancient ruins – suggests a fascination with the past, but also a refusal to engage with the present. He prefers dead civilisations to living ones. He is more comfortable with artefacts than with people. His relationship with the barbarians has been purely transactional: he trades with them, notes their customs, but does not truly know them. He tells himself that he treats them fairly, but his fairness is the fairness of a colonial administrator, not of an equal.
The arrival of Colonel Joll shatters this complacency. The Magistrate is horrified by Joll’s methods, but he does not intervene. He watches, he protests weakly, he writes letters he never sends. His passivity is the novel’s most troubling aspect. We want him to act, to stand up to Joll, to free the prisoners. But he does not. He is, as he later realises, a coward. His eventual act of rebellion – returning the barbarian girl to her people – is too little, too late. It does not stop the torture. It does not save anyone. It only leads to his own imprisonment.
The Magistrate’s relationship with the barbarian girl is the crucible in which his conscience is tested. He takes her in out of a mixture of pity, guilt, and curiosity. He wants to heal her, but he also wants to understand her – to read the history of her torture on her body. His nightly ritual of washing her feet is deeply ambiguous. Is it an act of love or an act of appropriation? Is he trying to restore her dignity or to possess her? The Magistrate himself is uncertain. He says, “I behave in some ways like a lover – I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her – but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate.” This confession reveals the dark side of his empathy: the line between care and control is dangerously thin.
The Magistrate’s journey into the desert is a symbolic death and rebirth. He crosses the border into barbarian territory, leaving the Empire behind. The desert is harsh, indifferent, and purifying. He strips away his old identity, his old loyalties. He finally sleeps with the girl, not out of passion but out of a desire for connection. When he returns to the settlement, he is a different man – but the Empire does not recognise his transformation. He is arrested, tortured, and humiliated. The torture completes his education. He learns what it feels like to be powerless, to be reduced to a body in pain, to be treated as less than human. He becomes, in effect, a barbarian.
The Magistrate’s final state is one of exhausted ambiguity. He is released, given back his position, but the Empire has collapsed. The soldiers have deserted. The townspeople are starving. He tries to write a history of the settlement, but he cannot remember clearly. His last dream is of children playing in the snow – a recurring image that represents innocence, but also coldness and death. The children melt away when he approaches. He is left waiting, uncertain, alone. Coetzee refuses to give him redemption. He is not a hero; he is a survivor, and survival is not the same as salvation.
Critics have read the Magistrate in multiple ways. Some see him as a liberal humanist whose values are inadequate to confront the brutality of imperialism. He believes in dialogue, in reason, in individual conscience – but these are powerless against the state’s machinery of torture. Others see him as a figure of complicity, a man who benefits from the Empire while claiming to oppose it. His archaeology, for example, is a form of appropriation: he takes the barbarians’ cultural heritage without their permission. Still others see him as a tragic hero, a man who tries to do the right thing and fails, but whose failure is itself a form of witness. The novel does not resolve these interpretations; it holds them in tension.
Key Facts and Contextual Background-
Waiting for the Barbarians was published in 1980 by Secker & Warburg in London and Ravan Press in South Africa. It won the CNA Prize (South Africa’s highest literary award) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (UK). The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize but lost to William Golding’s Rites of Passage. Despite its allegorical setting, the novel was scrutinised by South African censors but not banned – partly because its unnamed Empire allowed readers to project other colonial contexts onto it. The novel has since been translated into more than twenty languages and is considered a classic of postcolonial literature.
Historical Context – Apartheid South Africa: Coetzee wrote the novel during the height of apartheid, when the South African government enforced racial segregation through a brutal system of laws, forced removals, detention without trial, and state‑sanctioned torture. The novel’s depiction of Colonel Joll’s interrogation methods – sleep deprivation, psychological manipulation, physical abuse – closely mirrors the techniques used by South African security forces against anti‑apartheid activists. The “barbarians” are an allegorical stand‑in for the black majority, who were systematically dehumanised and dispossessed. However, Coetzee deliberately avoids direct reference to South Africa to give the novel universal resonance.
Key Quotations (Memorise These):
“I have never seen anything like it.” (opening line, referring to Joll’s sunglasses)
“The crime that is latent in us we must inflict on ourselves. Not on others.” (Magistrate to Joll, end of novel)
“I wanted to live outside history. I wanted to live outside the history that Empire imposes on its subjects.”
“The truth is not always in what is said. It is also in what is not said.”
“I am a country magistrate, a responsible official in the service of the Empire.”
“He wears sunglasses. Is he blind?”
Examination Model Answer
“How does J.M. Coetzee use the character of the Magistrate to critique the moral complicity of ordinary people in imperial violence?” Model Answer:
J.M. Coetzee constructs the Magistrate as a figure of profound moral ambiguity precisely to critique the passive complicity of ordinary people in imperial violence. The Magistrate is not a torturer; he is a bureaucrat, a civil servant, a man who administers the Empire’s day‑to‑day operations without ever getting his hands dirty. He tells himself that he is different from Colonel Joll, that he treats the barbarians fairly, that he is a man of conscience. Yet he does nothing to stop the torture. He watches, he protests weakly, he writes letters he never sends. Coetzee’s devastating insight is that this passivity is itself a form of violence – a violence of omission that enables the atrocities of the state.
The novel’s opening establishes the Magistrate’s complacency. He has served the Empire for decades and looks forward to a quiet retirement. His hobby is excavating ancient ruins, a metaphor for his refusal to engage with the living present. He prefers dead civilisations to the messy, morally compromised reality of colonial rule. When Colonel Joll arrives with his dark glasses and his theories of interrogation, the Magistrate is horrified – but he does not intervene. He tells himself that he is powerless, that Joll outranks him, that the Empire’s orders must be obeyed. These are the rationalisations of complicity. Coetzee shows that the Empire does not require fanatics to function; it requires ordinary people who look away.
The public beating of the barbarian prisoners is the novel’s most searing indictment of collective complicity. Joll has the prisoners stripped, smeared with dust, and labelled “enemy.” The townspeople are invited to beat them. A young girl is pushed forward and encouraged to strike a prisoner, which she does to applause. The Magistrate watches from the window. He does not go down. He does not stop it. He does not even speak. His inaction is the novel’s moral centre. Coetzee forces us to ask: what would we have done? The answer is uncomfortable. Most of us would have watched, too.
The Magistrate’s relationship with the barbarian girl is his attempt to expiate his guilt. He takes her in, feeds her, washes her feet. He wants to heal her, but he also wants to read her – to decipher the marks of torture on her body, to understand what happened to her. His nightly ritual of washing and oiling her feet is a kind of secular penance, but it is also a form of appropriation. He is using her to make himself feel better. The girl remains silent, her interiority inaccessible. Coetzee refuses to let the Magistrate (or the reader) claim that he understands her suffering. Empathy, the novel suggests, has limits – especially when it is performed by the oppressor.
The journey into the desert is the Magistrate’s symbolic attempt to break free from the Empire. He crosses the border, enters barbarian territory, returns the girl to her people. But this act of rebellion is too little, too late. It does not stop the torture. It does not save anyone. And it leads directly to his own arrest and torture. When Mandel dresses him in a woman’s smock and hangs him from a tree, the Magistrate becomes the other – the object of ridicule, the victim of state violence. Now he understands what the barbarians experienced. But understanding does not bring redemption. It only brings pain.
Coetzee’s critique of complicity extends to the narrative form itself. The Magistrate is the novel’s only narrator; we see everything through his eyes. This means that the barbarian girl never speaks, never tells her own story. Her silence is a structural feature of the novel, not an oversight. Coetzee is honest about the limits of representation: a white South African writer cannot speak for the colonised. The best he can do is to show the failure of empathy, the impossibility of fully understanding the other. The Magistrate’s inability to decipher the ancient script, to read the girl’s body, to remember clearly at the end – these are all figures for the failure of colonial knowledge. The Empire claims to know the barbarians, but it knows nothing. The Magistrate claims to care for the girl, but he cannot truly know her.
Some critics have argued that the Magistrate is a heroic figure, a liberal humanist who risks everything to do the right thing. I disagree. The Magistrate does not risk anything until it is too late. He acts only when the violence is already done. His heroism, if it can be called that, is retrospective and incomplete. A more persuasive reading sees him as a figure of tragic complicity: he benefits from the Empire, he participates in its structures, and his belated resistance does not absolve him. The novel’s final image – the Magistrate sitting in his office, unable to write, waiting for something he cannot name – is not a portrait of redemption. It is a portrait of exhaustion.
Coetzee’s novel thus offers a devastating critique of liberal guilt. The Magistrate feels bad about the Empire’s crimes, but feeling bad is not enough. He washes the girl’s feet, but he does not stop the torture. He writes a letter, but he tears it up. He returns the girl to her people, but he does not challenge the system that tortured her. Coetzee suggests that true resistance would require more than individual gestures of conscience; it would require a fundamental rejection of the Empire’s logic. But the Magistrate cannot make that rejection. He is too old, too tired, too invested in his own comfort. He is, in the end, a representative figure – not a hero, not a villain, but an ordinary man living under an extraordinary system of violence. And that, Coetzee argues, is the most damning indictment of all.
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