Reading Order
Waiting for the Barbarians Reading Order
Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) by J.M. Coetzee is one of the great political allegories of the twentieth century — a novel set in an unnamed empire's frontier, in a time and place never specified, following the Magistrate of a frontier outpost who has administered the border region for thirty years in comfortable semi-complicity with the empire's system, and who is forced to confront his own complicity when Colonel Joll of the Third Bureau (the empire's secret police) arrives to conduct an interrogation of 'barbarians' — the nomadic people who live beyond the frontier — who supposedly threaten the empire's security. The Magistrate watches Joll's interrogations with growing horror: prisoners tortured, killed, a young barbarian girl blinded and left in the town when Joll moves on. He takes the girl in, develops a complex relationship with her, and eventually undertakes a winter journey to return her to her people — an act of moral assertion that leads to his own arrest, torture, and imprisonment by the empire's forces. The novel's allegory is precisely calibrated: it is about apartheid South Africa (which Coetzee left, eventually, for Australia), but also about any imperial system, any torture state, any moment in which ordinary people must decide what complicity means and what the cost of moral assertion is. The Magistrate is not a hero — he is a man who understands too late, who has benefited from the system he now refuses, who cannot recover from his own guilt. The novel is essential to any understanding of how literature can function as moral testimony without sacrificing formal integrity.
Where to start
Waiting for the Barbarians — any edition. The novel is Coetzee's most allegorical work; the unspecified time and place are part of its method of addressing the universal through the particular.
Complete Waiting for the Barbarians Book List
- 1Buy
Waiting for the Barbarians
J.M. Coetzee·1980·The novel — the Magistrate's gradual confrontation with the empire he has served; the literary anatomy of complicity and torture. - 2Buy
Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee·1999·Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning post-apartheid novel — the same moral questions transposed to democratic South Africa; what complicity looks like after the system changes. - 3Buy
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad·1899·Conrad's empire narrative — the literary predecessor to Coetzee's inquiry into imperial violence; the novella that all subsequent anti-imperial fiction is written in response to. - 4Buy
The Plague
Albert Camus·1947·Camus's political allegory — the same allegorical method applied to occupied France; a specific political situation that speaks to universal moral questions. - 5Buy
Life & Times of Michael K
J.M. Coetzee·1983·Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning follow-up — Michael K's resistance to absorption by the state during a South African civil war; the companion allegory to Waiting for the Barbarians. - 6Buy
Burger's Daughter
Nadine Gordimer·1979·Gordimer's anti-apartheid novel — the specific South African political context for Coetzee's allegory; Rosa Burger navigating the inheritance of political commitment. - 7Buy
1984
George Orwell·1949·Orwell's dystopia — the empire's torture apparatus in miniature; the political allegory that Waiting for the Barbarians is in conversation with at the level of the state's power over the individual body. - 8Buy
The Trial
Franz Kafka·1925·Kafka's bureaucratic nightmare — the individual confronting the incomprehensible authority of the state; the structural predecessor to the Magistrate's imprisonment by the empire he served.
Waiting for the Barbarians — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Waiting for the Barbarians about?
Waiting for the Barbarians is narrated by the Magistrate of a frontier outpost of an unnamed empire. He has administered this remote border region for thirty years, maintaining a comfortable accommodation with the empire's power while not looking too closely at its foundations. Colonel Joll of the Third Bureau arrives to conduct interrogations of 'barbarians' — the nomadic people of the frontier — who are said to be planning an attack on the empire. The Magistrate watches Joll torture and kill prisoners, including a young barbarian girl who is blinded during interrogation. He takes the girl in, tends to her, and becomes obsessed with understanding her body and her experience. He eventually undertakes a dangerous winter journey to return her to her people — an act of self-assertion against the empire — and returns to find himself arrested, tortured, and displayed as a traitor by the empire's forces.
What is the allegorical meaning of 'the barbarians'?
The 'barbarians' of the title are the nomadic people who live beyond the empire's frontier — people the empire fears and uses as the pretext for its security apparatus. Coetzee deliberately makes it clear that the 'barbarian threat' is manufactured: there is no evidence of any planned attack, and the nomadic people who are captured and tortured appear to be simply people going about their lives. The empire needs barbarians — it needs an external threat to justify the Third Bureau, the torture, the military expenditure, the subjugation of frontier populations. This is the specific mechanism of imperial ideology that Coetzee anatomizes: the need for an external enemy to justify internal repression. In the context of apartheid South Africa, the 'communists' and 'terrorists' served this function; the novel makes the structure visible by removing it from its specific historical context.
Why is the Magistrate's relationship with the barbarian girl so central to the novel?
The Magistrate's relationship with the barbarian girl — he takes her in, nurses her, makes her his concubine, is unable to have sex with her, is obsessed with understanding her body (particularly the scars around her blinded eyes left by Joll's torture) — is the most morally complex element of the novel. The Magistrate uses the girl: she serves his guilt, his desire for atonement, his need to demonstrate to himself that he is not complicit. But the girl herself remains opaque to him — he cannot penetrate her inner life, cannot understand what she experienced, cannot make her into the figure of the suffering innocent he needs her to be. This opacity is the novel's point: the Magistrate's gesture of care is also a gesture of possession and appropriation, and the girl's resistance to being fully known is her own form of dignity. The relationship is a microcosm of the Magistrate's larger complicity: he wants to help, but his help is entangled with his own needs.
Is Waiting for the Barbarians specifically about apartheid South Africa?
Coetzee has described Waiting for the Barbarians as a 'novel about the relation between the man who administers the system and the man who is tortured by the system' — a deliberate universalization of a South African reality. The novel is set in no specific time or place; the empire has no name; the 'barbarians' have no specific culture or language. This is a formal choice: Coetzee wants the novel to be about apartheid South Africa, about European colonialism generally, about any imperial system that maintains itself through the manufacture of enemies and the use of torture. But the South African context is always present: the Third Bureau's methods are apartheid's security apparatus methods, and the Magistrate's thirty years of comfortable accommodation is the position of many white South Africans who benefited from the system without actively endorsing its worst features.
What should I read after Waiting for the Barbarians?
After Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999) are essential. His essays in Giving Offense (1996) and Doubling the Point (1992, interviews with David Attwell) provide the theoretical framework. For comparable political allegories, Kafka's The Trial, Orwell's 1984, and Camus's The Plague are the key predecessors Coetzee is in conversation with. For the South African context specifically, Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter and July's People are the most important companions.
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