The Violence of the Empire in J.M. Coetzee's Foe: A Postcolonial Perspective

J.M. Coetzee is considered to be a prolific writer who has responded effectively to the dominant narrative in colonial discourse. In his works J.M. Coetzee has exposed the colonial machinations, which the colonizers used to subjugate the colonized people. In this sense, Postcolonial literature is a counter-discourse, which unearths the hidden underpinnings in the colonial discourse. To dismantle the 'master narratives', Edward Said's 'contrapuntal reading' (1993) is  a useful technique to understand the various methods used by the colonists in their representations of the natives. Colonists have portrayed natives of the occupied territories as violent and wild people, who are to be controlled through aggressive means. This fabricated representation of the natives gives  a solid reason to the colonizersto justify their atrocities in the colonized territory. Contrapuntal reading of Coetzee's Foe (1986) helps the readers identify the real perpetrators of the crimes in the colonized world. In this novel, Coetzee shows how the colonizers in the name of civilization commit the severest type of aggression in colonized regionto suppress the innocent natives. Coetzee in Foe shows violence of the Empireat such a scale  that it deconstructs the dominant discourse of the colonizers that the natives in the occupied region are barbaric rather itfurther reveals the barbaric face of the colonizers. An attempt has been made in this paper to read the continuities of oppression in postcolonized societies by taking Foe as a reference point for a particular kind of contrapuntal and postcolonial reading.