SOURCE: "Territorial Metaphor in Coetzee's 'Waiting for the Barbarians'," in Ariel, Vol. 20, No. 2, April, 1989, pp. 69-79.

In the following essay, Jolly discusses the physical territory of both geographical locations and of the human body as a metaphor for colonial invasion in Waiting for the Barbarians.

When J. M. Coetzee's third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, appeared in 1980 it elicited a number of interesting responses which have to do—whether the reviewers realize this or not—with the implications of the setting of the novel. Leon Whiteson criticizes it for an apparent lack of mimetic accuracy: "The geography is garbled; there is desert and snow, lizards and bears. The story is told in that most awkward tense; the historic present. The dialogue is stiff, the writing has the air of a translation…. Coetzee's bad dreams have not been earned by any truth…. The heart of this novel is not...