On Style and First Impressions

Reading J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians is quite the different experience from reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The fact that the novel is written in the present voice is very interesting. The reader witnesses the action as it happens -- quite unlike the memories being retold in Heart of Darkness. As discussed in class, this prevents most foreshadowing and gives the reader an eerie uncertainty of what might happen later on in the novel.

Waiting for the Barbarians reads very quickly. Most of the sentences are short and to the point -- which is a far cry from the lengthy, flowery sentences of Conrad’s, who seems to delight in listing adjective after adjective.

This is, indeed, another detail which differentiates the two works of literature: Coetzee’s lack of long descriptive passages. Sure, there are small portions of description, however, the action is always moving forward. Each sentence and phrase seems to hold something of significance to either setting, character, plot, or theme. These full sentences make it extremely unbeneficial to become distracted while reading the novel, or to merely skim over lines. Missing a sentence could cause the reader to miss crucial bits of information and leave him or her lost within the plot. (Wait…. What just happened? When did he leave the granary? And where did those people come from?)

The text is also broken up frequently into portions of a few pages by pairs of asterisks, which allow the reader frequent breaks and gives the illusion of an even faster progression through the novel.

Overall, though, I seem to be enjoying Waiting for the Barbarians quite a bit. I am very much a fan of the asterisk breaks as mentioned in the previous paragraph. (I was never one for long chapters. They make my progress seem much slower.) I look forward to the completion of the text and its discussion in class. (319)

Happy Thanksgiving (Break)!