The course he decides upon is to take the beggar girl from his home and return her to her people.
After this liberating adventure, Everyman finds a strange man at his desk. When he asks what he wants, the stranger ignores him. Everyman's act of fidelity has now turned him into the very infidel he used to ignore (p69). He is charged with complicity in the barbarians' plot, is put under arrest, and contrives to flee -- but from what is he fleeing? "I am running away from pain and death. I have no plan of escape" (p87). And yet the Colonel, who knows the Light but denies it, knows Everyman: "You seem to want to make a name for yourself as the One Just Man, the man who is prepared to sacrifice his freedom to his principles" (p104). But when Everyman is tortured, he cries he only wants to live to live…He comforts himself with visions and daydreams, and yet the vision that disturbs him most is the one in which he sees that he is just as infected...
They are both members of the same side -- both oppressors. When the barbarians finally win back what they can, Joll will lose his shades and both men will see each other as their own reflection.
Everyman, at the end of the novel, is no more enlightened than at the beginning, though in a sense he is newborn -- and as he goes out joyfully to watch the children build a snowman he is able to participate in a kind of magic that heretofore has been denied him. Still, he leaves it "feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere" (p140). It is like a Hemingway ending, one where most senses are in order, but sight is still mostly lost -- and a sense of hopelessness pervades. Thus, our Everyman stumbles on. He has no answer to the Light.
Bibliography
Coetzee, J.M. (1999). Waiting for the Barbarians. Middlesex, England: Penguin
Books.
