Daniel Defoe’s "Robinson Crusoe" and J.M. Coetzee’s "Foe": Colonial Imagination and its Postcolonial Deconstruction

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the tale of a castaway turning his misfortune into a great enterprise, has become more than a famous novel; it has found its place among our cultural heritage. This paper will deal with certain interpretations of the novel that regard the protagonist Crusoe as a classic example of homo economicus, focus on a concept of work that is supposed to underline what is called dignity of labour and construct Crusoe’s island life as an ideal state of natural existence. All these concepts of interpretation that were applied to Defoe’s novel during time share, as conceived here, certain colonial connotations, which are also emphasised by Defoe’s concept of the native colonial subject Friday. Therefore, Defoe’s novel can still be read as a prototype of colonial fiction, mirroring the ideological concerns of the Western imagery on the ‘New World’. On attempt to deconstruct colonial fiction is the intertextual rereading of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe by the South African author J.M. Coetzee in his novel Foe. Coetzee’s work itself is here conceived as an attempt to deconstruct the colonial myth that has been implicitly or explicitly attached to the figure of Robinson Crusoe and his story. In regard to Coetzee’s reconception of the English classic the concepts that are illustrated and examined in the first part of this paper, in context of Defoe’s original, will be revised in terms of appropriation of space in colonial fiction, the figure of Crusoe and Friday and the question of the telling of colonial history.