Foe by J. M. Coetzee

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and 

J. M. Coetzee’s Foe: a comparative 

and critical analysis:

Introduction:

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) are in conversation across nearly three centuries. At first glance they share plot-signals a shipwrecked man, an island, the figure named “Friday” yet they pull in opposite directions philosophically, politically, and aesthetically. Where Defoe’s novel helped establish the emergent realist novel, celebrating individual industry, providence, and the colonial imagination, Coetzee’s Foe returns to that scene to interrogate authorship, silence, and power. This blog traces their points of contact and difference through narrative voice and authority, the representation of “the Other,” the politics of language and storytelling, and the ethical stakes of reworking canonical texts today.

1. Two projects, two ages:

Robinson Crusoe emerges in an age of mercantile expansion and proto-imperial ideology. It’s often read as a tale of self-made Protestant individualism resourcefulness, thrift, and conversion that maps onto Britain’s rising commercial power. Scholars have long argued that Defoe’s work is an ideological artefact of imperial and mercantile anxieties, using the castaway’s “mastery” of the island to naturalize settler dominion and commercial rationality. 

Foe, written in late twentieth-century South Africa by a novelist famously uneasy about authority and representation, deliberately refracts Defoe’s narrative through postcolonial and metafictional lenses. Coetzee’s project is not to tell the same adventure story but to expose the gap between events and the stories we make of them: who gets to tell, who is silenced, and how the novel form itself can participate in (or refuse) ethical witnessing. Critics have read Foe as Coetzee’s interrogation of colonial narrative practices and of the novelist’s (and reader’s) complicity in speaking for others. 

2. Voice, narrative authority, and the novel form:

Defoe’s Crusoe is a tour de force of framed autobiography. Presented as the life-story of Robinson Crusoe, it cultivates a convincing “true tale” voice: pious digressions, dates, financial details, and reflections that mimic documentary truth. This narrative solidity helped the book function as an origin story for the English novel rooted in the quotidian and plausible rather than aristocratic romance. The apparent transparency of Crusoe’s voice establishes an authoritative viewpoint: we are inside an “I” who has both survival expertise and providential insight. 

Coetzee, by contrast, unpacks and fractures authorial authority. Foe is mediated through Susan Barton’s attempts to have Daniel Foe (a barely disguised stand-in for Defoe) write her story. The novel includes letters between Susan and Foe, conversations, and a persistent refusal: Friday will not speak (and when he does, he cannot be understood or represented). By foregrounding the mechanics of literary production authorial requests, editorial decisions, and the novelist’s right to reshape testimony Coetzee stages the ethical problem of representation. The result is a fiction that constantly reminds us that stories are constructed, not transparent windows. 

3. Solitude, survival, and the human subject:

Both books use the island as a laboratory for thinking about solitude, self-reliance, and human nature, but they draw different conclusions. Defoe’s Crusoe embraces labor as a civilizing and godly activity; his mastery of the island reads as proof of human reason allied to divine providence. Crusoe’s psychological growth repentance, religious introspection, practical ingenuity maps onto an Enlightenment view that the individual, exercising reason and industry, can shape destiny.

Coetzee doesn’t deny the material reality of survival, but he refuses to let survival narratives alone justify epistemic domination. By placing Susan an articulate woman who insists on being the author of the island’s events at the story’s center, Foe complicates the reductive “man alone” cliché. Coetzee implicates the survival story in broader questions of who counts as a subject worthy of speech and who can claim to narrate another’s experience. Critics have noted how Coetzee’s text replaces the self-congratulatory solitude of Crusoe with a litany of unanswered questions and ethical anxieties about testimony. 

4. Friday: typology, othering, and voice:

Friday is the fulcrum on which most comparative work pivots. In Defoe, Friday is a converted “savage” who becomes Crusoe’s servant and companion. He is described in ways that make him legible and useful to Crusoe’s capitalist-Providential scheme: a prototypical colonial subject whose agency is suppressed in favor of representational utility. The relationship naturalizes hierarchy Crusoe as ruler, Friday as subordinate and thus becomes a paradigmatic scene of colonial paternalism. 

Coetzee takes Friday’s silence as his central moral problem. In Foe, Friday’s muteness (or silence as interpreted by others) symbolizes both the historical silencing of colonized peoples and the novelist’s inability (or unwillingness) to speak authentically for them. When the characters attempt to force a narrative onto Friday to translate his gestures into a moral tale they fail. Coetzee thereby questions the ethics of ventriloquizing the colonized: even sympathetic narrators can impose narratives that domesticate alterity. Scholars reading Foe often emphasize that Friday’s “unknowability” is not merely a narrative trick but a pointed critique of how Western narratives obliterate other forms of meaning. 

5. Gender, voice, and the figure of Susan Barton:

Susan Barton is Coetzee’s crucial invention: a woman survivor whose insistence on narrative ownership unsettles the male-centered traditions of shipwreck narrative. Susan’s presence reframes the island story as not simply a masculine tale of mastery but as a contested site where gendered authority plays out. She demands that her version be told, resists being assimilated to Crusoe’s myth, and exposes the gendered power dynamics of textual production: who gets character status, who becomes “hero,” who gets silenced.

Critical work has highlighted how Foe stages the literary marketplace’s appetite for commodified narratives (sensationalized by Daniel Foe) and how Susan’s subjectivity is repeatedly negotiated, marginalized, and transformed. Coetzee thus uses gender to complicate questions of narrative ethics: representing the female survivor means contesting both male narrative monopolies and broader colonial discourses. 

6. Metafiction, historiography, and ethical witnessing:

Defoe’s novel, while not metafictional in the modern sense, does gesture toward reflection on history and testimony (e.g., Crusoe’s “serious reflections” appended to his adventures). Still, its rhetorical aim is persuasion: the novel seeks to convince its reader of moral lessons and the plausibility of its events. Its form supports the ideological content: the “realistic” detail naturalizes the conclusions.

Coetzee’s Foe is overtly metafictional. It interrogates the reliability of testimony, the craft of the novelist, and the ethics of representing trauma. By dramatizing the act of requesting a writer to “make” a story, Coetzee insists that fiction-making is a moral act with consequences. The novel’s refusal to give Friday a legible narrative  its refusal to produce the satisfying closure readers might crave  serves as ethical chastening: sometimes silence or absence is the truest response to violence, and narrative closure can itself be an act of violence. Critics have framed Foe as a work that unsettles historiographic certainty and forces readers to reckon with what remains unrepresentable. 

7. Religion and providence:

Religious themes mark both books, but with different inflections. Crusoe repeatedly reads his providential deliverances as signs of God’s grace; his conversion narrative is integral to Defoe’s moral architecture. The island becomes a place of spiritual testing and eventual redemption.

Coetzee refigures religion as a contested language of power. In Foe, appeals to God and religious rationales surface in the characters’ attempts to interpret suffering, guilt, and silence but religion no longer offers simple consolation or teleology. Instead, Coetzee uses religious language to show how theological claims can be entwined with colonial authority (e.g., the missionary logic that justifies subjection). This complicates Defoe’s more affirmative use of providence and reframes spiritual discourse as another register of power. 

8. Politics, ethics, and the afterlife of the novel:

Why does reworking Robinson Crusoe matter? Because canonical texts shape cultural imaginaries. Defoe’s novel helped normalize settler logic, the naturalization of property, and the trope of the white European as the quintessential subject. Revisiting that origin point allows Coetzee and later critics to interrogate the ethical assumptions that underwrite modernity. Foe performs this interrogation not by countering with a mirror story but by refusing to reproduce the complacencies of its source: it complicates narrative authority, centers the question of representation, and makes silence a moral signpost rather than a failure of imagination.

Scholars have pointed out that such rewritings are part of a broader postcolonial project: to expose how stories produce social power and to refuse easy recuperations of colonial wrongs through sentimentalizing narratives. Coetzee’s retelling therefore functions as both a critical historiography and a moral experiment: it asks readers to live with ambiguity, with ethical discomfort, and with the possibility that literature can fail to heal historical violence. 

9. Limits, merits, and reading strategies:

Both texts remain invaluable. Robinson Crusoe still rewards readers interested in the birth of the novel, in how narrative realism can naturalize ideology, and in the early-modern negotiation of religion, commerce, and selfhood. Coetzee’s Foe is a masterclass in revisionary ethics and narrative skepticism: it teaches readers to question how stories are manufactured and whose stories get priority.

A productive reading strategy is to keep both texts in dialogue: read Defoe to understand the formal and ideological resources that made Crusoe persuasive to an eighteenth-century audience; read Coetzee to see how a late-twentieth-century novelist interrogates those resources and makes their ethical costs visible. Pairing them encourages attention to narrative technique (framing, voice, intertextuality) and to the political stakes of representation. For students and general readers, an assignable exercise is to compare a passage of Crusoe’s “serious reflections” with a passage of Susan’s petitioning to Foe: the contrast illuminates how the rhetoric of testimony can build or dismantle authority.

Conclusion:

Robinson Crusoe and Foe form a canonical conversation about the novel’s capacity to represent, to occlude, and to authorize. Defoe teaches us how a convincing realist voice can naturalize colonial relations; Coetzee teaches us how a skeptical, self-questioning fiction can expose the violence of such naturalization. Reading them together is not merely an exercise in literary history: it is an ethical undertaking. It asks that we scrutinize the stories that made modern subjectivities, recognize the silences those stories create, and learn how the act of telling itself can be an instrument of power. If Defoe’s island celebrates mastery, Coetzee’s island forces us to face the moral cost of that mastery and, crucially, to witness those costs without the consolations of false closure.

References:

- Bishop, G. Scott. “J. M. Coetzee’s Foe: A Culmination and a Solution to a Problem of White Identity.” World Literature Today, vol. 64, no. 1, 1990, pp. 54–57. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/40145792. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

- Coetzee, J. M. Foe. Penguin UK, 2010.

- Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Prakash Books, 2017.

- Flynn, Christopher. “Nationalism, Commerce, and Imperial Anxiety in Defoe’s Later Works.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, vol. 54, no. 2, 2000, pp. 11–24. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1348117. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

- Kavanagh, Thomas M. “Unraveling Robinson: The Divided Self in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 20, no. 3, 1978, pp. 416–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40754544. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

- Kraft, Quentin G. “Robinson Crusoe and the Story of the Novel.” College English, vol. 41, no. 5, 1980, pp. 535–48. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/375722. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

- Marais, Michael. “Interpretative Authoritarianism: Reading/Colonizing Coetzee’s ‘ Foe.’” English in Africa, vol. 16, no. 1, 1989, pp. 9–16. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40238630. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

- Rajiva, Jay. “Secrecy, Sacrifice, and God on the Island: Christianity and Colonialism in Coetzee’s Foe and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 63, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–20. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26806769. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

- Turk, Tisha. “Intertextuality and the Collaborative Construction of Narrative: J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Foe.’” Narrative, vol. 19, no. 3, 2011, pp. 295–310. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41289306. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

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