Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Four Paragraphs, No Feeling of Resolution
The beginning of the chapter four is confusing to me for several reasons, but one of which is the split between the two sections of the story - one of which occurs in a house, and then, after the line break and after the narrator sees the script, turns into a shipwreck scene. What's the distinction?
The narrator is presented with heavy imagery on the Susan's story, the still born, the couple in the sheets, the staircase, the script, etc. and then both sections end with Friday - one in which Friday's mouth opens and the sounds of the island can be heard, and the other in which a stream comes up out of his mouth and passes throughout the world.
What is Friday doing here? Is this his story, here in the world where "bodies are their own signs"? This is where his silence is given in its purest form, when it comes straight out of him after the narrator finds him. I believe it is Coetzee who guides us through the haunting images of this book, and finally reveals the "silence" he's been alluding to so much throughout the last three chapters. Coetzee is meticulously recapping the book that Coetzee made Susan badger Foe to write. In essence, he's showing himself find the silence, which is basically a metaphor for what he had been trying to do with Friday over the duration of the entire book.
In this context, are the two "scenes" of the house and the house and the shipwreck analogous to the book as well? They certainly mirror each other and provide eerily similar parallels like the first two chapters and the third did. And the first two chapters do take place in a place where "bodies are their own signs" and would fit right in with the paper dry metaphors. In this way, Coetzee could be rehashing his own novel.
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One characterization of the difference between Friday's role in the two parts of part IV is that the first Friday utters silence, but a silence which particularly references and thereby informs the previous three parts, whereas the second Friday utters silence which is universalized, he speaks the ubiquitous silence of the world's stories. Thus, Coetzee might be presenting us with the second Friday in order to transpose our understanding of the novel to our lives.
ReplyDeleteI think it's interesting to note that in the first section of Part IV, Friday opens his mouth and lets out all the sounds of the island, alluding to the idea that the story of the island is Friday's--not Susan's or Cruso's or even Foe's. I understood the novel as a means of relating to the audience what is inherently inexpressible, as a means of elucidating silence as a key component in any story. Friday's silent presence throughout the entire novel then represents that it is his story, one that Susan and Foe attempt to co-opt but are unsuccessful. The silent stream Friday emits at the very close of the novel then becomes analogous to the sounds of the island he emits just a few pages before: just as silence is Friday's story, so is the island.
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