In part IV, the last 5 pages of Foe, the first person narrator changes. Up to this point, Susan Barton has been carrying us through her story, despite her doubt in her own story-telling ability. However, in part IV, Susan is referred to in the third person. The narrator notes two people in the room she has entered into saying, "they lie side by side in bed, not touching." (153) A number of times throughout Foe, Susan describes lying in bed next to a man. Therefore, the narrator must be describing Susan and either Mr. Foe, Cruso, or the other captain. Susan is no longer narrating.
This is where things get confusing. Of course, as analytical readers, our first instinct is to determine who this new narrator is. Is it someone we have been told about before in the novel? Is it a new character? Could it be a God-like figure? I may just be speaking personally, but I had trouble moving on to the content of the chapter without knowing who was giving me this information. This unknown narrator was a troubling problem that needed to be resolved. After our class discussion on Tuesday, however, I realized that this was my downfall in reading this book. While constantly searching for a concrete and tangible narrator (as well as setting, time period, plot elements, etc.), I missed out on some greater meaning. I was trying to read this novel as a story with a beginning, middle, and end, when the whole point is that this is not how Susan wants her story to be told. Now, I think that the identity of the narrator of Part IV is somewhat irrelevant. And if not irrelevant entirely, then at least flexible. Thus far, my best explanation for this is that the narrator of Part IV is simply (or not so simply, I suppose) a parallel to the reader, as we touched on briefly in class. The narrator's curiosity about what lies behind Friday's clamped teeth is not representative of the narrator we have seen, it is representative of the reader. In the end, it does not matter that the narrator cannot be named or identified specifically.
This book does not follow a lot of norms like most novels. In this book, we are not supposed to focus on content or setting or plot at all. There is a much deeper meaning about silence and storytelling that is seen between the text. I agree that the narrator no longer "really" matters. By spending time trying to figure out who he/she is, we lose sight of the truth and silence in part IV. We know that the narrator is someone new by the way he/she acts and speaks because it is different than any other character we have already seen in the text. We are supposed to look past the mysterious narrator but it still makes me question Cotzee's reason for doing so. But I guess that too doesn't ultimately matter either. I think the most important element of part IV was the sense that truth keeps evading us and silence will always be preserved, which was demonstrated greatly by Friday.
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