Foe

by

J. M. Coetzee

Islands Symbol Icon

The desert island is the literal setting for much of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Foe, but the idea of islands also symbolizes the difficulty of communication. Despite being more social on the island than she is at any other time in the story, protagonist Susan Barton almost never uses language there, as one of her companions (Friday) has lost his tongue, while the other (Cruso) sees little need for words (either spoken or written). But when Susan returns to England, living with Friday in Mr. Foe’s house, communicating with others does not get any easier. Instead, she marvels that her life in London is just as silent and isolated as her time on the island, and she imagines that Mr. Foe, in hiding and alone, must be feeling similarly. “The world is full of islands,” Susan reflects; over the course of the novel, she comes to realize that those who are arrested, shunned, or even just separated from their loved ones can feel like “castaways in the very heart of the city.” Thus, islands come to represent the way that humans can be lonely even in—or sometimes especially in—a dense city or a closely packed home. 

Islands Quotes in Foe

The Foe quotes below all refer to the symbol of Islands. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
).
Part 1 Quotes

One day [Cruso] would say his father had been a wealthy merchant whose counting-house he had quit in search of adventure. But the next day he would tell me he had been a poor lad of no family who had shipped as a cabin boy and been captured by the Moors (he bore a scar on his arm which was, he said, the mark of the branding iron) and escaped and made his way to the new world. Sometimes he would say he had dwelt on his island in the past 15 years, he and Friday, none but they having been spared when their ship went down. […] Yet at other times, as for instance when he was in the grip of the fever…he would tell stories of cannibals, of how Friday was a cannibal whom he had saved from being roasted and devoured by fellow cannibals…So in the end I did not know what was truth, what was lies, and what was mere rambling.

Related Characters: Susan Barton (speaker), Cruso (speaker), Friday
Related Symbols: Islands
Page Number: 8
Explanation and Analysis:

Seen from too remote a vantage, life begins to lose its particularity. All shipwrecks become the same shipwreck, all castaways the same castaway, sunburnt, lonely, clad in the skins of the beast he has slain. The truth that makes your story yours alone, that sets you apart from the old mariner by the fireside spinning yarns of sea monsters and mermaids, resides in a thousand touches which today may seem of no importance, such as: when you made your needle…by what means did you pierce the eye? When you sewed your hat, what did you use for thread? Touches like these will one day persuade your countrymen that it is all true, every word, there was an indeed once an island in the middle of the ocean where the wind blew and the gulls cried from the cliffs.

Related Characters: Susan Barton (speaker), Cruso
Related Symbols: Islands
Page Number: 13
Explanation and Analysis:

I used once to think, when I saw Cruso in this evening posture, that, like me, he was searching the horizon for a sail. But I was mistaken. His visit to the bluff belonged to a practice of losing himself in the contemplation of the waste of water and sky. Friday never interrupted him during these retreats; when one site innocently approached him, I was rebuffed with angry words, and for days afterwards he and I did not speak. To me, sea and sky remained sea and sky, vacant and tedious. I had not the temperament to love such emptiness.

Related Characters: Susan Barton (speaker), Friday, Cruso
Related Symbols: Islands
Page Number: 33
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2 Quotes

When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: of being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso. Is that the fate of all storytellers? Yet I was as much a body as Cruso. I ate and drank, I woke and slept…Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr. Foe: that is my entreaty for though my story gives the truth, it does not give the substance of the truth (I see that clearly, we need not pretend it is otherwise). To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet, and a comfortable chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through; and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes, and of feeling the tropic sun when it is cold; and at your fingertips the words with which to capture the vision before it fades. I have none of these, while you have all.

Related Characters: Susan Barton (speaker), Mr. Foe, Cruso
Related Symbols: Islands
Page Number: 45
Explanation and Analysis:

Dubiously I thought: are these enough strange circumstances to make a story of? How long before I am driven to invent new and stranger circumstances: the salvage of tools and muskets from Cruso’s ship; the building of a boat, or at least a skiff, an adventure to sail to the mainland; a landing by cannibals on the island, followed by a skirmish and many bloody deaths; and, at last, becoming of a golden haired stranger with a sack of corn, and the planting of the terraces? Alas, will the day ever arrive when we can make a story without strange circumstances?

Related Characters: Susan Barton (speaker), Cruso
Related Symbols: Terraces, Islands
Page Number: 60
Explanation and Analysis:

You will believe me when I say the life we lead grows less and less distinct from the life we lead on Cruso’s island. Sometimes I wake up not knowing where I am. The world is full of islands, said Cruso once. His words ring truer every day.

Related Characters: Susan Barton (speaker), Mr. Foe, Cruso
Related Symbols: Islands
Page Number: 65
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3 Quotes

I am not a story, Mr. Foe. I may impress you as a story because I began my account of myself without preamble, slipping overboard into the water and striking out for the shore. But my life did not begin in the waves. There was a life before the water which stretched back to my desolate searchings in Brazil, thence to the years when my daughter was still with me, and so on back to the day I was born. All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world. I choose rather to tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire.

Related Characters: Susan Barton (speaker), Friday, Mr. Foe, Cruso, Young girl
Related Symbols: Islands
Page Number: 122
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4 Quotes

But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies have their own signs. It is the home of Friday.

He turns and turns till he lies at full length, his face to my face. The skin is tight across his bones, his lips are drawn back. I pass a fingernail across his teeth, trying to find a way in.

His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face.

Related Characters: Susan Barton, Friday
Related Symbols: Islands
Page Number: 149
Explanation and Analysis:
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Foe PDF

Islands Symbol Timeline in Foe

The timeline below shows where the symbol Islands appears in Foe. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part 1
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
Embellishment vs. Deception Theme Icon
...from rowing, she jumps in the water and swims. She eventually makes it to an island, where she collapses, petticoats and all. Before she can sleep, though, she looks up to... (full context)
Enslavement, Silence, and Erasure Theme Icon
Friday leads Susan across the island, up a steep hill. At one point, Susan gets a thorn in her ankle, and... (full context)
Embellishment vs. Deception Theme Icon
...out on the whole ocean, where she notices the boat that brought her to this island sailing away. She realizes that she is in a small encampment, and that another European... (full context)
Gender and Creation Theme Icon
...bowls and a spade, have all been crafted from the wood and stone on the island.  Susan laments that Cruso does not have better tools with which to plan an escape. (full context)
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
Gender and Creation Theme Icon
...want to write things down, and thus preserve a record of his time on the island; after all, as she points out, memory is faulty. But Cruso insists that “nothing I... (full context)
Enslavement, Silence, and Erasure Theme Icon
Gender and Creation Theme Icon
One day, Susan explores the island against Cruso’s wishes. When she returns, he is angry at her for disobeying him—but she... (full context)
Embellishment vs. Deception Theme Icon
Gender and Creation Theme Icon
...get into a fight. After a few hours, Susan remembers that her position on the island is precarious, and she apologizes to Cruso. That night, she feels some measure of real... (full context)
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
Now that Susan has shoes, she starts walking all over the island, feeling herself slip into a kind of “waking slumber.” Though Susan sometimes pushes for change—for... (full context)
Gender and Creation Theme Icon
...never touches her again, she tells her reader that if she had stayed on the island much longer, she would have wanted to have a child with Cruso—she could not bear... (full context)
Enslavement, Silence, and Erasure Theme Icon
Gender and Creation Theme Icon
Susan also begins to become curious about what kind of laws exist on the island. When she asks Cruso about it, he insists that there are no laws. Susan fears... (full context)
Embellishment vs. Deception Theme Icon
...however, Susan views Cruso with more admiration. After all, if her first days on the island were so difficult, how terrible must it have been for Cruso? She is impressed that... (full context)
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
Enslavement, Silence, and Erasure Theme Icon
About a year after Susan’s arrival on the island, Cruso becomes sick again—and this time, his illness seems deadly. But as if by fate,... (full context)
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
Embellishment vs. Deception Theme Icon
...has never been a female castaway. But Susan assures him that her time on the island was boring, not good enough for a book to be written. (full context)
Gender and Creation Theme Icon
...comes to believe that Cruso is dying of woe at having been separated from their island. She lies next to him and calls him “my Cruso”; she reminds him of the... (full context)
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
Gender and Creation Theme Icon
...disposal of all that Cruso leaves behind,” Susan brags, “which is the story of his island.” (full context)
Part 2
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
Embellishment vs. Deception Theme Icon
...Foe, Susan explains that she is attaching the whole history of her time on the island to this letter; since she has no money and needs to pay for her lodgings,... (full context)
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
Embellishment vs. Deception Theme Icon
Though Susan spent her whole time on the island wanting to leave, she is surprised to find that she now misses it dearly. She... (full context)
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
Gender and Creation Theme Icon
...wishes she could help Mr. Foe access what it felt like to be on that island.   (full context)
Enslavement, Silence, and Erasure Theme Icon
Embellishment vs. Deception Theme Icon
...knows about Cruso’s shipwreck, which she believes took place on the north side of the island. Susan discusses the difficulty of bringing anything from the ship onto the island through the... (full context)
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
Gender and Creation Theme Icon
...Susan resolves to make sketches of some of the things Cruso left behind on the island. (full context)
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
Enslavement, Silence, and Erasure Theme Icon
...without it. She also comments on how different Friday seems than he did on the island: there he was strong and agile, and in England, he just eats oatmeal and lies... (full context)
Embellishment vs. Deception Theme Icon
...books he writes. Susan explains that if Mr. Foe writes about their time on the island, they will become rich, and Friday will be able to go home to his family... (full context)
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
Gender and Creation Theme Icon
...the strange things that happened to her from the mutiny through her rescue on the island. Susan wonders if she will invent details: about cannibals come to the shore or about... (full context)
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
...is, and what kind of information he has access to. “The world is full of islands,” Susan reflects, thinking of her own loneliness and of Mr. Foe’s. Sometimes, she thinks that... (full context)
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
Embellishment vs. Deception Theme Icon
...cannot write their story herself, as she knows how tedious and monotonous life on the island truly was. She wonders aloud whether Friday really was a cannibal, or if it was... (full context)
Embellishment vs. Deception Theme Icon
Thinking back to her time on the island, Susan wonders what might be different if instead of just building a bed, Cruso had... (full context)
Embellishment vs. Deception Theme Icon
Suddenly, however, Susan is heartened: there was some “mystery” on the island. Why was Cruso so obsessed with those fruitless terraces, and how did he and Friday... (full context)
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
Enslavement, Silence, and Erasure Theme Icon
...story. She compares writing to the work Friday and Cruso did moving stones around the island, though she feels that writing is even more difficult. Before she sets about her task,... (full context)
Embellishment vs. Deception Theme Icon
Friday is dressed in Mr. Foe’s wig, and Susan in her old sandals from the island, so they get lots of stares on the road. Each time, Susan explains that they... (full context)
Part 3
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
Embellishment vs. Deception Theme Icon
...presses Mr. Foe to say how the “history” of her and Cruso’s time on the island is progressing. Mr. Foe replies that writing is slow, because it is “a slow story.”... (full context)
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
...switches back to asking about Bahia, even though Susan protests that Bahia is “not the island” and therefore not worth Mr. Foe’s time.  (full context)
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
Enslavement, Silence, and Erasure Theme Icon
Gender and Creation Theme Icon
...to her own lived narrative, especially when Foe doubles down on his assertion that the island is not interesting on its own because it “lacks light and shade.” Frustrated, Susan replies... (full context)
Gender and Creation Theme Icon
...sex, Susan is reminded of Cruso, and she closes her eyes, trying to imagine the island. But Susan cannot conjure that memory, so instead, she straddles Mr. Foe, whispering that this... (full context)
Enslavement, Silence, and Erasure Theme Icon
...sex, Foe begins to wonder about Friday throwing petals in the water back on the island. Maybe he was trying to appease a kraken, a giant sea monster. Or maybe he... (full context)
Embellishment vs. Deception Theme Icon
Gender and Creation Theme Icon
...story “over and over, in version after version, stillborn every time: the story of the island,” which is “lifeless” no matter who writes it.  (full context)
Part 4
Enslavement, Silence, and Erasure Theme Icon
...the first couple sentences in the novel. But now, instead of going on to the island, the narrator ducks beneath the surface of the sea, where they are quickly covered in... (full context)
Storytelling and Power Theme Icon
Enslavement, Silence, and Erasure Theme Icon
...comes out, pushing through the shipwreck and across all the cliffs and beaches of the island. The narrator, still unnamed, ends their tale by describing Friday’s stream: “soft and cold, dark... (full context)