Anonymity and Moral Blindness in Waiting for the Barbarians

Introduction: Anonymity and the Everyman Figure

Anonymity saturates Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee. From the nameless narrator — the near-to-retiring magistrate — to the deliberately vague time, place, and people (details such as race are never immediately apparent), Coetzee creates an Everyman in an extraordinary frontier setting. This Everyman is interested in ordinary things, a fact gleaned from the very opening of the novel: "I should take you fishing one night…" he says to Colonel Joll, a man who wears dark glasses even indoors, lending him an air of inscrutability (p. 2). The effect on the reader is immediate: sympathy flows toward the narrator, suspicion toward Joll.

But that is precisely the point. In Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee presents a world in which some wear shades to keep out the Light of truth — to hide themselves from that same Light — regardless of which side of the political field they inhabit, regardless of race, creed, or sex, and regardless of whether they are superior or inferior in the hierarchy of the governed.

Colonel Joll is such a man. The nameless narrator who is our Everyman is another. The two differ, however, in one crucial respect: Joll wears dark glasses to keep others from discovering what is hidden in his eyes — the fact that he is a barbarian — while our Everyman wears no such device, yet remains equally oblivious to the Light of truth.

Colonel Joll and the Willful Concealment of Truth

Everyman's protection is not eyewear; it is naivety. That naivety allows him to speak for the abused boy in the prison, who looks at Colonel Joll with some instinctive sense of what the man represents. The magistrate assumes the boy is merely awed by the colonel's glasses: "He must think you are a blind man," he says jokingly to Joll. Joll, we are told, does not smile back (p. 4). The reason is clear — Joll is not blind. It is Everyman who is blind.

The two men hold a conversation on the subject of torture. All the reader comes away with is Joll's clinical account: "First, I get lies, you see — this is what happens — first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth. That is how you get the truth." Yet it is clear to Everyman, and should be to the reader, that for Joll there is no such thing as truth. Or, as Everyman frames it: "pain is truth…" (p. 6). The Light is too painful to bear, and so Joll arranges his world to ensure he never has to face it.

Joll's dark glasses thus function as the novel's central symbol of willful concealment — a deliberate mechanism for denying reality while projecting authority. His inscrutability is not a mystery but a performance, and it is one the magistrate is initially too credulous to see through.

Naivety as Protection: The Magistrate's Early Blindness

The degree of Everyman's blindness becomes apparent when he describes Joll in his own words as one who "finds out the truth" (p. 4). There is fear behind the statement, as though Everyman suspects his own ignorance even as he voices it. The compassion he attempts to show is lost on the prisoners — the old man and his boy — because his words betray his gullibility. Joll is not interested in truth. He is not interested in mercy. Even when Everyman, almost despite himself, pleads on behalf of the prisoners, the man who "finds out the truth" remains shielded from these petitions. Everyman registers a slight annoyance at Joll's "cryptic silences, at the paltry theatrical mystery of dark shields hiding healthy eyes" (p. 5). He begins to sense his own ineffectiveness and reflects — suddenly — on his ignorance, not only of Joll but of everything the Colonel represents: "Of the screaming which people afterwards claim to have heard from the granary, I hear nothing" (p. 5).

When he subscribes to the letter of a nameless law (p. 7) by summoning the guard to give a statement following the prisoner's torture and murder, his blindness is confirmed. He does not even know the law he is following. He is as much a prisoner as the one just killed. When he subscribes to the letter, he foreshadows his own end — for the letter kills, but the spirit gives life.

The naivety that protects Everyman will not last. Unlike Joll, he does not put on shades. Instead, he takes a lantern and goes to look upon the scene with his own eyes, trespassing, as he says, on the "mysteries of the State" (p. 6). Only after he becomes "embroiled" in the affairs of the prisoners — caring for the boy — does he reveal anything about himself: "I am a country magistrate, a responsible official in the service of the Empire, serving out my days on this lazy frontier, waiting to retire. I collect the tithes and taxes…" (p. 7). In this moment he reveals himself as a Levite figure, oblivious in his passing — though, as the essay will argue, this is a story in which Christ is nowhere to be found.

If Christ, as St. Paul says, offers the crown, Coetzee's Everyman wants only "to merit three lines of small print in the Imperial gazette" (p. 8). His self-awareness is remarkable for its smallness. He sees nothing, wants nothing — only quietude. Tales of unrest reach his ears; he chalks them up to idleness and continues in his own idle way (p. 8). The parallel to Christian mythology is difficult to ignore: Everyman says, "Show me a barbarian army and I will believe." But blessed are those who have not seen and still believe. Ironically, Everyman is himself a member of a barbarian army — the Imperial Army.