Mystifying Mischief

Thus far in reading Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M Coetzee, I have found the most interesting aspect to be the theme of vagueness. Coetzee establishes this theme’s importance in the opening sentences of the novel, when the Magistrate does not understand the role of the Colonel’s sunglasses. To the Magistrate, whose knowledge of such inventions has been reduced to its primitive forms, the glasses serve as a barrier between the Colonel and the world into which he has stepped. They protect the most revealing part of the Colonel’s body from being deciphered by the Magistrate. The relationship between these two white men, both somewhat foreign to the land in which they have been placed, is unconcernable to the Magistrate. He refers to the Colonel as being cryptically silent and hidden behind “dark mysterious circles.” The essence of dreams and sudo-realism also surrounds the Magistrate. I think that this is way of cooping with his situation at hand, and ironically the only time he feels real in a world where his surrounding have been obstructed and his life turned completely bizarre. His first dream that the reader is revealed to is his dream of the dead girl, whose body has been matted with bees. At first glance, the Magistrate sees a girl with pubic hair described as “liquid black and gold,” a beautiful seductive image, but upon touching the girl the bees reveal themselves. His dream is a foreshadow to his encounter with the blind girl; the girl is presented as an innocent figure in his dream, while the bees a symbol for the empire, almost suffocate her with their presence and tease her with their power as they simply sit atop her. Magistrate clearly sees the blind girl’s essence, but at the same time, struggles with the issue of her vision and past. Nevertheless, he creates an intimate relationship, which he does not have with any other human in the Empire, which is synthesized through cleansing her body and falling asleep in the act. Thus far their relationship is the purest in the novel, though it is clouded by her lack of sight. The magistrate often struggles with the foggy morals of the Colonel and deals with this through clouding his own. (373)