After rereading Part IV of Foe around five times, I’m pretty much
just as confused as I was after reading it the first time. However, here is my interpretation of the
ending to this novel:
The
narrator in Part IV is someone we had not heard from prior to this. In Part IV we saw that he/she entered the house of Daniel Defoe and found a note
that read, “Dear Mr Foe, At last I could row no further.” I immediately thought
of the first line of this novel, which reads, “At last I could row no further.”
In class we talked about the different possibilities of how Susan's story was formed and manipulated and if some of the characters were even real. After reading this last
part, I believe this narrator from Part IV found Friday, a dead Susan
Barton, and a note to some author “Mr. Foe”. Then with help from his imagination, he created a story. This narrator created and wrote the entire story we read in Part I, II, and III.
Is any of
this accurate? I have no idea. I do not know what J.M. Coetzee really meant in
this last part, but maybe that’s the point. I am sure there are purposefully many different interpretations of this story. Therefore I realized that no matter how
many times I reread it, that sense of confusion will never completely go away.
I like your interpretation, although I don't really think Coetzee wants us to know who was narrating part IV in light of our class discussion on Tuesday. I think Coetzee is demonstrating how in reality, even when we start with a clear and straightforward story, the influence of others and their voices will complicate matters to the point that we have a "mess" that nobody can understand.
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