Paper 203: The Postcolonial Studies assignment

 Paper 203: The Politics of Silence: Friday’s Muteness as a Symbol of Colonial Erasure

Personal Information: -

Name: -Manasi Joshi

Batch: - M.A. Sem 3 (2024-2026)

E-mail Address: -mansijoshi202@gmail.com

Roll Number: - 15

Assignment Details: -

Topic: The Politics of Silence: Friday’s Muteness as a Symbol of Colonial Erasure

Paper & subject code: - Paper 203: The Postcolonial Studies

Submitted to: - Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, MKBU, Bhavnagar

Date of Submission: - 10 November 2025

Abstract This essay explores the character of Friday in relation to colonial power, representation, and silence. Drawing on post-colonial theory—especially Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and critical scholarship on J. M. Coetzee (via Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee and J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event), it argues that Friday’s muteness functions as a powerful symbol of the voiceless colonial subject. His silence underlines how colonial discourse systematically erases or controls the subaltern’s voice; the efforts of Susan to speak for him reveal post-colonial anxieties about representation, witnessing and power; and the novel’s unresolved question of narration exposes the ethical stake in who has the right to tell another’s suffering. The essay maintains that Friday is a complex figure: not simply an object of erasure, but a site of contested representation, and his muteness invites critical reflection on the politics of narration and the enduring legacy of colonial power.

Keywords: Friday, muteness, colonial erasure, subaltern, representation, narration, Coetzee, Spivak

Introduction In post-colonial literature one often finds characters who embody the tensions of power, voice and agency. Among them, the figure of Friday stands out as a haunting representation of the colonial subject whose story remains unheard. His enforced silence, his subjection, and the efforts of others to speak on his behalf all raise critical questions: How does colonial power erase the voice of the subaltern? What happens when a supposedly voiceless figure is given a narrator or interpreter? Who has the right to narrate the suffering of the other? This essay addresses these questions by analysing Friday as a representation of the voiceless colonial subject, as well as exploring how Susan’s attempts to speak for him reflect post-colonial anxieties about representation. I will draw on the theoretical insights of Spivak in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, and on scholarship on J. M. Coetzee by Graham Huggan & Stephen Watson (Critical Perspectives) and Derek Attridge (Ethics of Reading). In the main body I will first examine Friday’s silence as a locus of colonial erasure; next, I will explore Susan’s attempt to narrate and to speak for him; finally, I will reflect on the novel’s ending and the question of who may legitimately narrate another’s suffering. The conclusion will emphasise how Friday’s muteness serves both to symbolise and to critique colonial power, while inviting readers to think ethically about voice, silence and representation.

Main Body 1. Friday’s Silence as Colonial Erasure The first dimension to consider is Friday’s muteness as a symbol of how colonial power erases the subaltern’s story. In the colonial encounter, the coloniser often imposes his voice, his frameworks, his language, while the colonised subject becomes silenced or spoken for. Spivak argues that the “subaltern” – that is, a subject outside the hegemonic structures of power, knowledge and representation – is effectively prevented from speaking in his or her own right. She writes that the subaltern’s “voice” is blocked by epistemic violence: “When they speak in their own name, they are not heard.”

Hence, the muteness of Friday can be read as emblematic: he is the colonial subject whose own narrative is erased or made impossible within the dominant discourse. The colonial power does not simply silence him; it remakes him into an object of the coloniser’s speech, into someone to be spoken about rather than someone who speaks. In addition, the figure of Friday stands in the paradoxical zone of being present yet absent: he exists physically, he is acted upon, but his voice is not presented, his own subjectivity remains concealed. This chimes with Spivak’s critique of Western scholarship’s attempt to “speak for” the colonised:

“The discursive institutions which regulate writing about the other are shut off to postcolonial or feminist scrutiny.” Thus Friday’s silence represents the erasure not only of his voice but of the very possibility of his autonomous narrative within colonial discourse.

Furthermore, from a reading of Coetzee’s works (as summarised in Critical Perspectives on Coetzee) one sees how the writer repeatedly engages with characters who are marginalised, dispossessed, spoken-for or voiceless. Friday’s muteness also invites the reader to consider the ethics of witnessing: we are urged to recognise that we do not have direct access to his subjectivity but only to what is mediated through others. In that sense, his silence becomes a powerful critique of colonial power’s capacity to silence, to appropriate and to render the subaltern invisible.

2. Susan as Narrator – Representation and the Anxiety of Speaking for the Other The second dimension of the argument focuses on Susan’s attempt to speak for Friday, and what this reveals about postcolonial anxieties regarding representation. If Friday cannot speak (or is not heard), then Susan emerges as the one who narrates his story, speaks on his behalf, or claims to translate his suffering for the reader. But this act of speaking for the other is fraught with ethical and epistemological problems.

Spivak warns of the dangers of the intellectual speaking for the subaltern: “The ‘subaltern’ cannot speak, not when the western academic field is unable to relate to the other with anything other than its own paradigm.”

In this sense Susan embodies the figure of the Western (or colonial) interlocutor who tries to give voice to the voiceless. Yet her voice is coloured by her own assumptions, frames of reference, and power positions. She may believe she is helping Friday by narrating his story, but in doing so she may reinscribe the very power dynamics that silence him: the coloniser’s voice, speaking about the colonised, claiming to represent him, while his own agency remains absent.

In his analysis of Coetzee, Derek Attridge emphasises that we must attend to the “responsibility to the other” – a theme central to Coetzee’s fiction. He argues that literature can act as a site of ethical engagement, where representation brings demands of trust, betrayal, confession, and responsibility.

Susan’s attempt to narrate Friday thus carries an ethical burden—she must ask: am I listening to his voice, or am I replacing it? Do I allow him to speak, or do I impose my narrative onto him? The anxiety of speaking for the other stems precisely from this ethical tension.

Moreover, the novel uses Susan’s voice to expose the limits of representation. She may offer an account of Friday’s suffering, but she cannot fully know his interiority, his perspective. Her story becomes a placeholder for the lost voice of Friday. In that sense, Susan’s narration becomes a site of colonial anxiety: the voice of the coloniser (or postcolonial chronicler) claims to uncover the voiceless subject, yet inevitably participates in the erasure of that subject’s own voice. The conflict between wanting to reveal and the risk of rewriting is central.

3. Narration, Silence and the Right to Tell

The third dimension asks: at the end of the novel, when the haunting question remains of who has the right to narrate another’s suffering, what does Friday’s silence signify? The novel does not simply provide a tidy resolution; rather it invites readers to confront the ethical and political stakes of voice, witnessing and narration.

Spivak’s question—“Can the subaltern speak?”—is, in actual practice, also a question of who listens, who records, and who is authorised to tell the story. She demonstrates that even when the subaltern appears to ‘speak’, his voice is mediated through the dominant discourse and may not be heard in his name.

The novel uses Friday’s silence to expose the structural impossibility of the subaltern fully telling his own story within the prevailing power structure. At the same time, by leaving the question unresolved, the text opens the space for the reader to reflect on the ethics of representation: we must ask ourselves—as readers, as scholars, as narrators—do we have the right to tell the story of another? And if so, under what conditions?

In his work on Coetzee, Attridge argues that the reader’s engagement with the novel becomes an event: reading is not passive but involves ethical attention to the other. 

The text of the novel invites us to become aware of our own participation in the act of narration. When Susan narrates for Friday, we are forced to watch: to what extent is her narrative authentic, and to what extent is it yet another form of colonial appropriation?

The haunting silence of Friday at the close of the novel underscores that there is no simple redemption in narration. His voice may remain muted, but its very muteness speaks—to the absence of voice, to the suppression of subaltern agency, to the unspeakable dimensions of colonial violence. The question of who has the right to narrate becomes central. The novel suggests that perhaps the only responsibility is to listen, to acknowledge that one cannot fully represent another, and to remain ethically alert to the power dynamics of narration.

Conclusion

In sum, the character of Friday stands as a powerful symbol of the voiceless colonial subject. His muteness reveals the mechanisms by which colonial power erases or controls the subaltern’s story. Through his silence, the novel exposes how the colonised are often deprived of the capacity to speak in their own name, a condition deeply explored by Spivak in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. Susan’s role as narrator reflects the post-colonial anxiety surrounding representation: her attempt to speak for Friday raises the ethical questions of appropriation, voice, witnessing, and power. Ultimately, the novel foregrounds the question of who has the right to narrate another’s suffering and invites the reader into a space of ethical responsibility. By refusing to provide a clear voice for Friday, the text does not offer closure; instead it demands that we reflect on the limits of our own capacities to represent, to speak for, or to witness the other. In this way, Friday’s muteness is not simply a gap or failure—but a deliberate and provocative site of resistance: his silence speaks volumes about colonial erasure, the politics of voice, and the ethics of narrative.

References

Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Huggan, Graham, and Stephen Watson, editors. Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee. Macmillan, 1996.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271-313.