In the typical manner of the perfect stranger and ultimate seafarer, Crusoe is the

ideal native who returns home too late to turn this happy event into a celebration.
In 1971, J. M. Coetzee decided it was about time the strange surprising
adventures of Robinson Crusoe were given a fresh start and in 1986 published Foe. The
title is significant in many ways. It first signals that, as a rewrite, it opposes its hypotext
only to bring to the fore the marginalised aspects and characters in Robinson Crusoe. It is,
in a way, an artistic foe to Robinson Crusoe. By opposing it, Foe increases the virtues
and amends the drawbacks of Defoes novel. At the same time it adds its own list of
failings and achievements.
Certainly, postcolonial critics would have liked the novel to express a more severe
judgement of Crusoe-Friday relationship and they blamed Coetzees questionable
handling of the slave problem in a book that offered plenty of opportunities for an overt
attack on British colonialism. Friday is mute in the novel and he is perpetually dependent
on a white woman who feels responsible for having brought him into her world. But Foe
is centered elsewhere and brings to light the issues of authorship and the narrators
reliability. It is not by accident that it bears the real name of one of the most prolific
authors in the 18th century. Daniel Foe was a gentleman of many abilities who, though
rather old, found the necessary leisure and inspiration to put down the story of a fictional
British merchant shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. The story enjoyed a success
much beyond its authors expectations. But since the author has been known as Daniel
Defoe to posterity, it is quite sagacious to bring his real name under focus especially if
one intends to deal with the personae of the author and his/her multiple facets when
author-izing a narrative.
But Coetzees novel does not contain only one author. There are several authors,
as there are several stories. The narrator is a woman, Susan Barton, who is left to drift at
sea and finally reaches the shores of a rocky island where she meets an old, weary and
barely vocal Robinson Crusoe. He is very far from the Crusoe we are familiar with, he
has been working uselessly on terracing the island, has kept no diary or calendar and
spends his days in long contemplation. Crusoe has shared his island and long spells of
silence with mute black Friday, a slave he saved from slave-traders. Friday, on the other
hand, is so aloof and Susan understands so little of him, since he shares none of the

western forms of communication, that he is a sort of black hole in the story. Friday only
knows a few English words but he cannot speak because his tongue was cut off.
Back in England, Susan Barton develops strategies of telling her story. But to
have the story published she approaches Mr. Foe, a much renowned author. And though
she starts her return to civilization with a small lie, assuming the identity of Mrs. Crusoe,
for the sake of appearances, she is very intent on the truth of the story being told. Foe, the
writer-character who accepts to write Susan Bartons story, is on the other hand, a
versatile man transforming them into marketable produce.
The novel brings forth the motif of salvation only in connection to telling. The
issue of the author and his/her reliability in fiction is deliberately deferred in Foe. Susan
complains the only persons who could tell the right story of the island are Crusoe and
Friday. But Crusoe is now dead and Friday is unable to speak physically and psychically.
The next in line is Susan herself, but she does not possess the necessary skills. And the
next is Foe, a total stranger, who is to tell a story he only heard fragments of. But since he
is a master of words, situations, circumstances, he will tell the one and only story of
Robinson Crusoe. The story that has survived.