dependency on slavery, violence and death to expand. Indeed the irony that Crusoe retches when he is presented with the idea that he should eat mans flesh when he himself was on a voyage to feed of another nation, in the enslavement of coloured me, to further himself in a monetary sense.Coetzee was writing in a very different time and this is reflected in his treatment of the characters of Friday and Susan Barton. Coetzee was born in 1940 in South Africa and was an exile writer. Fridays silences are as important in Foe as his speeches in Robinson Crusoe. The silences that fall speak volumes of Fridays enslavement and mutilation and it is these that make him an important character in this novel. Susan Barton often can be seen to be speaking for Friday and putting words into his mouth and his head. She projects the feelings that she feels, and the conversations that she thinks, Friday should have. This is exploring an idea that when examining race issues is of paramount importance; does a white person have the right to speak for a black man who is silenced? Is this not just the white man second-guessing what the coloured man feels when in truth he should be allowed to speak for himself? These are important issues that are raised by Coetzee in this novel, ideas that were not considered in the time that Defoe was writing.It is possible to see Foe as a more realistic version of Robinson Crusoe, portraying the truth behind the story. As it appears to me that Friday is more likely to react to his change in surroundings as in Foe that in Robinson Crusoe. This, however is a 21st century view and in the 16th century the story did not need to be particularly realistic as long as the audience could relate to it in fact Defoe himself might not know how Friday would react. The character of Friday can therefor be seen to reflect the time that the respective novel was written in. Both versions of this character were as thought provoking and controver...
