The Purpose of the Magistrate

In J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, I find the Magistrate’s personality to be one of indecisiveness and therefore, curiosity. From his actions speaking louder than his words (i.e. his sleeping with the barbarian girl while saying that he feels no particular desire for her) to his giving her the choice of staying with him or going back to her people which leads him to his own confinement, the narrator seems curious and indecisive and sometimes, contradictory.

What is the significance of the magistrate being with the barbarian girl? When he states, “I lose myself in the rhythm of what I am doing. I lose awareness of the girl herself. There is a space of time which is blank to me: perhaps I am not even present,” he seems to feel this tranquil state of mind each time with the barbarian girl (28). Is it this loss of time that is attractive to the narrator? Is this why he spends time with the barbarian girl? Or does he truly feel a sense of sympathy where “it occurs to [him] that whatever [he] want[s] to say to her will be heard with sympathy, with kindness” (22)? Is he attempting to show everyone that the barbarians are not bad people, but rather, just trying to defend what is rightfully their property?

This is how the narrator sees himself through the girl’s eyes: “When she does not look at me I am a grey form moving about unpredictably on the periphery of her vision. When she looks at me I am a blur, a voice, a smell, a centre of energy that one day falls asleep washing her feet and the next day feeds her bean stew and the next day—she does not know” (29). With the words Coetzee uses such as grey (but visible?) when the girl can see him, but a blur (seemingly less visible or less straightforward) when she actually looks at him shows the ambiguity of the magistrate himself. The seemingly contradictory descriptions show the magistrate’s own personality. Either grey or a blur, he knows that he is unpredictable to the girl (and possibly everyone else, especially when the men are surprised that the barbarian girl is going on the journey with them, as they don’t know that the Magistrate is giving her the choice of going back to her people). Even in Part IV, when the Magistrate is in confinement, he still feels his own indecisive nature about pretty much everything: “My heart lurches (with horror? with gratitude?) at the thought” (96).

Overall, I can’t really figure out what the Magistrate wants. Obviously, he cares about the barbarians/sees them in a different light than anyone else in the empire. But what is the purpose of his type of personality in the story? (465)