Foe

“We must make Friday’s silence speak, as well as the silence surrounding Friday”(142). Because Friday can not speak they try to teach him to write, Susan begins but gets easily frustrated. Friday shortly after establishes himself at Foe’s desk wearing his wig and his robe. Susan overreacts and tells Foe “He will foul your papers,” and Foe just replies to Susan , “My papers are foul enough, he can make them no worse” (151). Friday was writing “rows and rows of the letter O tightly packed together” (152). Friday was writing the symbol of nothing, an O is a circle, which can also signify the symbol of the world that Friday is not a part of. This scene follows Susan's acknowledgment that "we are all alive, we are all substantial, we are all in the same world," (152) an observation that excluded Friday. The O can also signify that history comes full circle and that colonization by Europeans has occurred over and over, and the fact that Friday has no voice signifies how the Europeans have silenced the people they have colonized.
How does the last chapter of Foe then deal with the chance that the novel itself might signify just another attempt to make Friday speak in the name of interests that are not his own? The novel is arranged in 4 parts that consists first with Susan’s voice, beginning with her version of how she became a castaway. Part 2 consists of Susan writing to Foe to communicate her story so Foe can write it. In part 3 unlike in part 1 or 2 there are no quotation marks, because Susan has taken up her own narrative, narrating her encounter with Foe. In part 4 a ghost narrator appears, who the narrator speaks to and who the narrator is confusing. The end is the last phase of the book where one expects closure, but we get no closure with this ending, we just get another unreliable narrator. The ghost narrator comes to Foe’s home two times, in the first scene he passes the daughter, Susan and Foe are lying in bed, and all three are dead. He then finds Friday, but Friday is alive, feeling a light pulse, feeling his teeth and listens, He hears, “the faintest faraway roar," "like the roar of waves in a seashell." "From his mouth, without a breath, issue the sounds of the island" (154). The part of history that Susan was not capable to tell of the island still belongs to Friday. J.M. Coetzee wants his readers to know that just because Friday can not speak, that does not mean that Friday does not have a history or his version of what happened at the island.
I felt that the end was a dream sequence, a dream that Friday dreamt. Susan, Foe and Susan’s daughter are dead because in Friday’s world they are dead, they don’t seem to live in the world that he lives in. They do not understand him and he understands that they do not understand him. The ending is confusing and I think Coetzee may try here to give Friday a voice, but by making the voice nameless he gives the reader the opportunity to make their own interpretation of what the ending signifies and who is narrating. Friday I believe is a strong character, though he has no language, we as readers want to hear his reality, therefore we want to believe that part 4 is Friday narrating.

God's Bits of Wood

"Early the next morning the workmen began to gather in front of the gate to the workshops and the yards, preparing to return to work. out of the old habit, they grouped together almost automatically, according to their various trades and their separate crews. There were still many who were not there, those who had not yet returned from the villages, but the old atmosphere, the familiar framework of the past, was swift in re-establishing itself. A noisy, celebrating crowd thronged the adjoining streets and squares; the cohort of beggars, thinner than before, waited for the daily distribution of soup; and the flies and the dust were back. The great iron gates were still closed, and there were two soldiers standing guard, but no one paid any attention to them"(Pages 243-244).
In this paragraph we can see that life is returning to the past. The men, the workmen are ready to return not only to work, but to their previous ways of living. The strike progresses and the French management decide to cut off the men that are on strike from the local access to water and they pressure the local merchants to not sell them any food as well. This shows that the men who were once the providers for their families must step aside and they must rely on their women. In the above paragraph we see the men finally going back to where they feel they should be, working to provide for their families. The men are eager to start working and are eager for their women to return to their traditional roles. But the growing hardships that the families faced only strengthens their resolve, especially that of the women. Some of the husbands that considered faltering are forced into resoluteness by their wives. In fact, it is the women who defend themselves with violence and clash with the French, not the men. The men were not willing to put up the good fight as the women were, all they want is for the past to re-establish itself but with better treatment and with better wages.
I believe the men were afraid of how much more strength the women had than them. The women realized that they were the ones that were able to stand up to the white men who were carrying guns and they were the ones who were able to assert themselves in their homes and villages, and make themselves a part of the decision making process in their communities. The awaking process begins with the strike, and it enabled the women to see themselves as active participants in their own lives and they saw the influence they possessed in their society.