Who Needs Mr. Foe

While reading Foe, I could not shake the idea that it was all so ironic. As J.M. Coetzee tells us Susan Barton's story through her letters, we come to understand as readers how desperately the narrator wants her story to be told. "Here I wait for you to appear, or for the book to be written that will set me free of Cruso and Friday"(Coetzee, 66). As the story continues and her goal seems more and more out of reach, we are told the very story Susan wants someone else to publish. Perhaps it is due to my being manipulated into thinking this way, but it seems paradoxical that the story is being told by the character trying so hard to avoid telling it herself. She wants nothing more for her tale to be told, but wants nothing to do with authorship. This obsession leads her to live in his house until he can set her free, but I wonder if Susan will ever realize that she is doing no different than the mysterious Mr. Foe would be if he were ever to write about her. As the novel progresses, she may be coming to terms with this more and more, "To whom and I writing? I blot the pages and toss them out of the window. Let who will read them" (Coetzee, 64). Here it would seem that Mr. Foe may just be a stand-in, or an excuse to be authoring her own story.