From Crusoe to Foe: A Comparative and Critical Analysis of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe
Introduction to the Blog
This blog is written as part of an academic assignment under the guidance of Megha Trivedi Ma’am, Department of English. The purpose of this blog is to explore the comparative and critical dimensions of two significant literary works Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe and Foe (1986) by J. M. Coetzee.
The two novels, though separated by more than two centuries, are connected through intertextuality. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of the most influential novels in English literature a tale of survival, colonial expansion, and individual enterprise. Coetzee’s Foe, on the other hand, is a postmodern rewriting of the same story that deconstructs its colonial, racial, and gendered assumptions.
This blog will analyze both novels from comparative and critical perspectives examining themes of colonialism, authorship, silence, power, gender, and storytelling and explore how Coetzee reimagines Defoe’s narrative in the context of postcolonial and feminist discourse.
Here are two videos that might help for basic understanding of the blog
J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (by TheatreofPhil) — a discussion of Foe’s themes of authorship, metafiction and power.
- Focuses on Coetzee’s novel in depth and explicitly mentions its relationship to Robinson Crusoe, which ties nicely into your comparative analysis.
- See this video for a deeper dive into Coetzee’s rewriting of Defoe
Introduction to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
- Author: Daniel Defoe
- Published: 1719
- Genre: Adventure / Realist Fiction
Robinson Crusoe is considered one of the earliest English novels and a founding text of modern fiction. It narrates the story of Robinson Crusoe, an Englishman who becomes stranded on a deserted island for twenty-eight years after a shipwreck. There, he learns to survive through labor, rationality, and faith.
The novel reflects the spirit of the Enlightenment human reason, self-reliance, and the Protestant work ethic. Crusoe becomes a symbol of the self-made man, mastering nature and asserting dominance over it.
However, Defoe’s narrative also reveals deep colonial and imperial ideologies. Crusoe sees the island as his possession and Friday as his servant. The relationship between Crusoe and Friday is symbolic of European colonial authority over non-European subjects.
Introduction to J. M. Coetzee’s Foe
- Author: J. M. Coetzee
- Published: 1986
- Genre: Postmodern / Postcolonial Fiction
J. M. Coetzee’s Foe is a reinterpretation of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe from a postcolonial and feminist perspective. The novel tells the story through the eyes of Susan Barton, a woman castaway who finds herself on an island with Cruso (without the ‘e’) and his tongueless slave Friday.
When Susan returns to England, she meets Daniel Foe, a writer, and tries to convince him to write her story. However, Foe manipulates her narrative to suit literary conventions, silencing her experiences and altering Friday’s story.
Through this, Coetzee explores the politics of storytelling who gets to tell stories, whose voices are silenced, and how history is written.
Comparative Overview: Two Worlds, Two Visions
Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe in the 18th century, during the rise of British colonialism, when travel, trade, and exploration were shaping European identity. J. M. Coetzee, on the other hand, wrote Foe in the late 20th century, in postcolonial South Africa, where questions of race, power, and representation were at the heart of intellectual debates.
Defoe’s novel is a realist adventure, emphasizing order, progress, and divine providence, while Coetzee’s Foe is a postmodern and postcolonial narrative, focusing on ambiguity, silence, and the manipulation of stories.
In Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist Crusoe is a white European male whose voice dominates the story. In Foe, Coetzee replaces this perspective with that of Susan Barton, a woman narrator. This shift allows Coetzee to critique both patriarchal and colonial narratives.
In Defoe’s text, Friday, though a central figure, is reduced to a submissive servant who learns Crusoe’s language and religion. In Coetzee’s Foe, Friday is mute, his tongue cut out a direct metaphor for the silenced subaltern whose story cannot be told within the framework of colonial discourse.
Thus, where Defoe’s work represents the voice of empire, Coetzee’s novel becomes a voice of resistance.
Colonialism and the Imperial Mindset
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe mirrors the European colonial mindset. Crusoe views the island as his property and refers to himself as the “king” of the island. His relationship with Friday is based on mastery and control.
“I thought I had reason to call my island the Island of Despair; but I found reason to call it the Island of Hope.” (Robinson Crusoe, Ch. 9)
This optimism reveals his faith in reason, labor, and divine providence the core of the colonial spirit. Crusoe represents the Enlightenment ideal of man’s dominion over nature and the “civilizing” of the so-called savage.
In Coetzee’s Foe, this colonial logic is dismantled. Cruso is not a heroic colonizer but a weary man without ambition. He does not try to master the island, and Friday’s silence becomes an unsettling presence.
“Friday has no command of words and therefore no defense against being re-shaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others.” (Foe, p. 121)
Here, Coetzee reveals how language itself becomes a tool of domination how those without language (or those silenced) are reshaped by others’ stories. Through this inversion, Foe transforms the colonial narrative into a postcolonial critique.
Gender and Representation: The Voice of Susan Barton
In Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, women are almost completely absent. The novel celebrates masculine independence, enterprise, and adventure. Crusoe’s world is male-centered and governed by rationality and faith.
Coetzee, however, introduces Susan Barton, a female narrator who challenges this male-centered tradition. She struggles to have her story written and recognized by the male author, Daniel Foe. Her story becomes a metaphor for women’s struggle for authorship and agency in patriarchal society.
“The story I desire to be known by is the story of the island. You are the author, I am the one who was there.” (Foe, p. 40)
Susan’s plea highlights her fight for narrative ownership. Yet, her story is rewritten, altered, and silenced by Foe, representing how women’s experiences are often shaped by male writers and excluded from literary history.
Thus, Coetzee’s Foe becomes a feminist revision of Robinson Crusoe, giving a voice to the gender that Defoe’s world had erased.
The Theme of Authorship and Storytelling
One of the most striking contrasts between Robinson Crusoe and Foe is in their treatment of authorship and truth.
Defoe presents Crusoe’s tale as an authentic “history,” claiming in the preface that it is “a just history of fact.” The novel blurs the line between fiction and truth, giving Crusoe’s narrative a sense of realism and authority.
Coetzee, however, dismantles this illusion. Foe is metafictional it questions how stories are told and who controls them. Susan Barton’s story passes through multiple filters her own memory, Foe’s rewriting, and Coetzee’s narration showing how power operates through narrative.
The novel’s ambiguous ending, where the narrator descends into the water and finds Friday’s silent body, symbolizes the limit of representation. Coetzee reminds us that not every story can be told, especially those of the oppressed and the silenced.
Silence and the Subaltern
Friday’s silence is central to Foe. Unlike Defoe’s Friday, who learns to speak English and becomes Crusoe’s obedient companion, Coetzee’s Friday is tongueless. His mutilation is both literal and symbolic representing the historical silencing of the colonized.
“The sounds he makes... are not speech but the sighing of the wind.” (Foe, p. 147)
Through this haunting imagery, Coetzee dramatizes the impossibility of giving full voice to the subaltern the colonized subject who has been denied history and language.
This directly echoes Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s question: “Can the subaltern speak?” In Foe, the answer seems to be “no.” Susan tries to make Friday speak, to recover his story, but his silence remains. The reader is left to face this absence a reminder of how colonialism erased countless voices.
In contrast, Defoe’s Crusoe celebrates the power of naming. By naming Friday, the island, and every object he owns, Crusoe asserts his authority. For Coetzee, this act of naming is not creative but colonial domination. By refusing Friday speech, Coetzee refuses to let the colonizer’s language define him.
Postcolonial and Postmodern Perspectives
Coetzee’s Foe operates within both postcolonial and postmodern frameworks.
From a postcolonial perspective, the novel retells the story from the point of view of those who were previously marginalized a woman and a slave. The island, once a symbol of conquest, becomes a space of loss and erasure.
From a postmodern perspective, Coetzee breaks the conventional narrative structure. The story is fragmented, self-conscious, and uncertain. It constantly questions the authenticity of storytelling and exposes how history is shaped by power and imagination.
Where Defoe’s narrative affirms certainty, progress, and divine order, Coetzee’s narrative embraces ambiguity, multiplicity, and silence. Foe therefore becomes not a sequel, but a dialogue across time, challenging the assumptions of the original text.
The Motif of the Island: Space and Symbol
In Robinson Crusoe, the island represents a place of rebirth and mastery. Crusoe transforms a barren island into a productive paradise through work and faith. The island becomes a symbol of human resourcefulness and colonial success a microcosm of empire.
In Foe, the island is stripped of this glory. It is no longer a space of triumph but one of emptiness and silence. Cruso builds nothing lasting, and his life lacks purpose. The island becomes an anti-colonial symbol, a place that reflects futility rather than conquest.
This change of meaning reflects Coetzee’s larger critique of the colonial myth. The island, once a metaphor for man’s mastery over nature and others, now becomes a site of absence a reminder of those excluded from history.
Religion, Morality, and Humanism
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is grounded in Christian morality. Crusoe interprets his isolation as divine punishment and eventually as spiritual redemption. His return to faith symbolizes the moral order of the 18th century, where religion justified human suffering as part of God’s plan.
“I learned to look more upon God as my deliverer.” (Robinson Crusoe, Ch. 10)
Coetzee, however, removes divine explanation. Foe is set in a secular, morally ambiguous world. The absence of God mirrors the postmodern crisis of meaning, where morality is replaced by questions of power and responsibility.
In this sense, Coetzee’s humanism is not religious but ethical he calls on readers to confront the silences and erasures that literature, history, and empire have produced.
Structure, Style, and Language
Defoe’s narrative is linear, chronological, and factual in tone. It follows a pattern of sin, punishment, repentance, and redemption typical of early realist fiction.
Coetzee’s narrative, on the other hand, is fragmented and circular. The story shifts between letters, memories, and dreams. This structure reflects the postmodern uncertainty of truth and experience.
The language of Robinson Crusoe is plain and didactic, emphasizing practical details and moral lessons. Foe employs a symbolic, layered style filled with metaphors of silence, water, and writing. Coetzee uses language not to clarify but to unsettle.
Conclusion: Rewriting as Resistance
Through Foe, Coetzee invites readers to re-read Defoe’s classic through new lenses feminist, postcolonial, and philosophical.
Where Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe celebrates the rise of modern individualism and empire, Coetzee’s Foe questions the cost of that triumph. It exposes the silences and exclusions on which Western literature was built.
By rewriting Defoe’s story, Coetzee transforms the act of storytelling into a political and ethical gesture one that acknowledges those whose stories were never told.
Ultimately, Foe is not a sequel but a resistance a rewriting that restores complexity, voice, and humanity to those once silenced by empire and patriarchy.
Works Cited
Coetzee, J. M. Foe. Penguin Books, 1986.
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. London: W. Taylor, 1719.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Routledge, 1994.
Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Hulme, Peter. “The Cannibal Scene.” Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797. Routledge, 1986.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. University of California Press, 1957.
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