Characters of Waiting for the Barbarians

J.M Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians is narrated by a man called the Magistrate. He is magistrate of an empire supposedly being attacked by barbarians. We see him as an older man with sympathetic and sound views. He is a reliable narrator, I believe, evident through his disapproval of Colonel Joll. Colonel Joll is the only character in the novel with an actual name and is often depicted wearing sunglasses. Because of the concern over the barbarians attacking the empire and pillaging livestock, Joll is called upon to “investigate.” “Finding the truth” is his main concern with these investigations, but from the eyes of the Magistrate, Colonel Joll is way off the mark. He interrogates all the wrong people and beats them until they tell him what he wants to hear, which is that the barbarians are preparing an attack on the Empire. This is, in other words, the “truth.” Colonel Joll is a corrupt leader and the Magistrate is seemingly the only one aware. Everyone else is won over by the propaganda about the barbarians coming to attack and the urgent need for information in order to prevent a war. The Magistrate is the main character and Colonel Joll is his antagonist in the first section.


We see everything through the Magistrate’s eyes and tend to sympathize with him. Waiting for the Barbarians is like his diary entry. He does not trust Joll and finds him very useless against the cause. It is hard to tell whether the Magistrate thinks that there are barbarians waiting to attack or not. However, he shows suspicions with reflections like, “in private I observed that once in every generation, without fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians.” The Magistrate is smart, observant, and also sympathetic of the unfairly beaten prisoners. He seems to have a good head on his shoulders and that is why we trust him as a narrator.