A Comparative and Analysis of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Coetzee’s Foe

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Coetzee’s Foe

Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) is widely regarded as a foundational text of the English novel and a classic articulation of early colonialist ideology. Nearly 270 years later, Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee re-engages with this canonical work in his 1986 novel Foe, not merely to retell the story but to conduct what may be termed a postcolonial critique of a second order. Coetzee’s Foe is a postmodern, satirical reinvention that shifts the narrative’s focus away from adventure and survival toward a deeper interrogation of authorship, narrative authority, and the silencing of marginalized voices.

From Empire Builder to Colonial Critique

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is often read as an allegory for the rise of the English bourgeoisie and its imperial spirit. Crusoe, the enterprising protagonist, is depicted as a model colonizer who, through diligence and reason, establishes a Christian and orderly dominion on a deserted island. The novel thus contributes to the construction of "Englishness" and a Eurocentric worldview, reinforcing colonialist ideologies through a narrative of individual conquest and mastery over nature and non-Europeans 

In contrast, Coetzee’s Foe works to deconstruct this nationalist and Eurocentric imagination. Through its metafictional structure, the novel challenges the political and cultural assumptions embedded in Defoe’s original, exposing the idea that Eurocentrism is not inherent but constructed through narrative and language. As a South African writer confronting the legacies of apartheid and colonial violence, Coetzee’s intervention is particularly potent, offering a literary indictment of the historical deprivation of speech and cultural erasure that shaped colonial regimes.

The Power Struggle for the Pen

While many postcolonial texts “write back” to empire by reimagining stories from the perspective of the colonized, Foe goes further by questioning the very origin and legitimacy of canonical texts. The central conflict in Foe is not survival on a desert island, but the struggle for narrative authority between the female castaway Susan Barton and the professional author Mr. Foe—a fictionalized version of Defoe, whose real surname was originally “Foe”.

Susan Barton survives her ordeal alongside a dispassionate and ineffective Cruso (Coetzee’s variation of Defoe’s Crusoe) and a tongueless, enslaved man named Friday. After her rescue, Susan attempts to record her story, believing it to be worth telling on its own terms. However, Mr. Foe resists her plain and truthful account, insisting instead on embellishing it with sensational elements—cannibals, lost daughters, dramatic escapes—to suit the expectations of the reading public.

Coetzee uses this metafictional exchange to expose the politics of storytelling. Mr. Foe's editorial interventions highlight how colonial narratives are not neutral records but products of power, shaped by omission, distortion, and market logic. 

Friday and the Silencing of the Subaltern

The most dramatic difference between Defoe’s and Coetzee’s texts is in their portrayal of Friday.

• In Robinson Crusoe, Friday is the “grateful savage”—converted to Christianity, taught English, and rendered obedient to Crusoe’s rule. He is a symbol of the colonial subject, assimilated and silenced under the guise of being “civilized.”

• In Foe, Friday is a voiceless black man, his tongue violently removed either by slavers or Cruso. This literal muteness becomes symbolic of the systemic silencing of colonized peoples. His body is the site of historical trauma—a record of pain that cannot be easily translated into language or narrative.

Susan Barton tries repeatedly to give Friday a voice, but her efforts fail. She sketches his portrait, speculates about his past, even encourages him to play music. Yet his silence remains impenetrable, raising the unsettling possibility that some experiences are untranslatable within the dominant language of the colonizer. As such, Friday’s muteness becomes a powerful metaphor for the limits of representation and the persistence of historical erasure.

In this context, Foe critiques not only Defoe’s novel, but also the very idea of speaking for the subaltern—suggesting that such efforts may only reproduce the structures of erasure they claim to resist.

Susan Barton: The Marginalized Female Voice

In addition to its postcolonial concerns, Foe also addresses gendered silencing. In Robinson Crusoe, women are peripheral—Crusoe’s mother, a widow, an unnamed wife—all brief mentions in a male-centered world. Coetzee radically shifts this by centering Susan Barton, a female castaway who seeks to narrate her own experience.

However, Susan’s attempt to “father” her story is continually undermined. Mr. Foe not only edits and rewrites her account, but also suggests inserting invented subplots—such as a missing daughter—to make it more appealing. Susan's refusal to accept these fictions reflects her insistence on owning her narrative, but she ultimately lacks the institutional power to resist appropriation.

Her position is deeply ambivalent. As a white woman, she is both marginalized and complicit in structures of power. She acts as a protector and sometimes interpreter for Friday, yet she cannot escape the same systems of erasure that silence him. Her struggles thus echo feminist and postcolonial critiques of literary authorship, illustrating how agency can be claimed, but not always secured.

Postmodern Strategies: Intertextuality and Ambiguity

Foe is not just a rewriting; it is a postmodern deconstruction of the narrative foundations of Robinson Crusoe. Through its intertextual references, metafictional framing, and refusal to offer closure, Coetzee destabilizes the reader’s understanding of truth, fiction, and history.

The novel’s enigmatic final chapter (Chapter IV) moves into surreal territory. An unnamed narrator—possibly a metaphorical stand-in for the reader—enters a dreamlike scene where he finds the drowned bodies of Susan and others. The climax arrives when he opens Friday’s mouth, only to find not speech, but a stream of water flowing out: “It passes through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth.”

This image is profoundly symbolic. It suggests a non-verbal, embodied form of meaning, in which trauma, memory, and resistance persist beyond language. Friday’s stream represents the unrecoverable histories of the colonized, flowing beneath the surface of official narratives and beyond the reach of imperial authorship.

Conclusion: Reclaiming Silence, Dismantling Empire

While Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe constructs a myth of colonial mastery and English individualism, Coetzee’s Foe dismantles that myth from within. Through its layered intertextuality, critical re-imagining of characters, and postmodern narrative strategies, Foe critiques the silencing inherent in imperial and literary traditions.

More than just a counter-narrative, Foe challenges the foundations of narrative authority itself—asking whether it is ever truly possible to recover the voices of the silenced, or whether the legacy of empire is an absence that resists articulation.

In this way, Coetzee’s novel shows how the meanings of canonical texts evolve when read through the lens of their historical consequences and contemporary reimaginings. Foe is not simply a retelling—it is a rewriting of the very act of storytelling.

References

Caracciolo, Marco. “J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and the Embodiment of Meaning.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 36, no. 1, Fall 2012, pp. 90–103. doi:10.2979/jmodelite.36.1.90.

Coetzee, J. M. Foe. Vintage International, 1987.

Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Edited by Michael Shinagel, W.W. Norton & Company, 1994.

López, María J., and Kai Wiegandt. "Introduction: J.M. Coetzee, Intertextuality and the Non-English Literary Traditions." European Journal of English Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, 2016, pp. 113–126. doi:10.1080/13825577.2016.1183422.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s ‘Crusoe/Roxana.’” English in Africa, vol. 17, no. 2, Oct. 1990, pp. 1–23. JSTOR.