Waiting For The Barbarians

Barbarians simply meant foreigners. By the 1200 “barbarian” was a much more negative term referring to people who lived beyond the reach of civilization, people who were savage, evil. The Mongols were barbaric with the amount of land they conquered, laws, and punishments. The barbarians were barbaric in many different ways.

3. For this assessment I have decided to agree that the Barbarians were truly “barbaric”, I have found four pieces of evidence that support my claim with great details on why I believe that.

Randy Bragg succinctly encapsulates Alas, Babylon when he tells Florence, “Survival of the fittest . . . The strong survive. The frail die” (Frank 176). This is the message that anyone who does not adapt to the world will die. Take pets for example, “The exotic fish die because the aquarium isn’t heated. The common guppy lives. So does the tough catfish. The house cat turns hunter and eats the pet bird. If he didn’t he’d starve. That’s the way it is and that’s the way it’s going to be” (Frank 176). When a change like this happens people start doing abnormal things to meet their needs. People attack others in order to get any scarce resources they may need. The main character, Randy Bragg, “felt nauseated . . . in disgust at the beasts who in callous cruelty had dragged down and maimed and destroyed the human dignity of this selfless man [Dan Gunn]” (Frank 241). This is an example of people doing whatever is necessary to survive, even if it means attacking and leaving an innocent man on the road to die.

"Their (Natives) present condition, contrasted with what they once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies…By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for a while their once terrible names. Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to

Last but definitely not least, Polyphemos from the Odyssey is by far at the tip of that barbarians scale. In the beginning passage about Polyphemus, he is presented as quite gentle with his heard of sheep while milking them, this give no indication to him being uncivilized and violent (Homer, pg. 143). But as the story progress, the audience can sense that he is less and less similar to their ideal of a Greek citizens. Polyphemus expressed that the Cyclopes do not concern themselves with Zeus since they are far better than the gods, this means he does not adhere to the same religious system as the Greeks do (Homer, pg. 144). Not only that, Polyphemus does not adhere to the Greek custom of giving gifts and hospitality to guests in the worst

As the barbarians took control of territory, the greatest cultural change was in who held power at the highest levels of society. Eventually, the Roman Empire grew too expansive for the imperial bureaucracy to govern the Western regions (Hitchner, Jan-May 2016). Both the fact that the imperial bureaucracy was so intrinsic to the everyday running of the empire and the fact that elites had lost both their local influence and military authority would have meant that any breakdown within the administration would have created a vacuum of power which allowed barbarian groups to take control of these areas both economically and politically. Most notably, the largest landowners in areas controlled by barbarian peoples were non-Romans

The Goths, being well known throughout the country and to other barbarians, came from Scandinavia and around the Baltic. Splitting into two parts, the Visigoths, the Western Goths, and the Ostrogoths, the Eastern Goths, they became two of the most known Germanic Tribes to this day due to their large impact on the Roman Empire. The Ostrogoths were led by Theodoric towards Italy after removing themselves from Hun control. Theodoric ruled from 493 until 526, during such time he had conquered northern Italy and the Visigoths had made it their home (Willis). Theodoric was ruthless to everything and one he came across, using his sword he would slice people in two. Although he did such terror, his people saw him as an effigy.

solution to such a broad and complex issue is incredibly ignorant in light of events that occur

The Germanic people are often portrayed as the barbarians of Europe during the Middle Ages. This perception comes

It is a common thing: an innocent, kind, humane person joins the military, goes to war, and comes back as a psychological disaster. They either become paranoid, depressed, anything to this nature. However, there are also individuals who go to war with prior psychological conditions. In J.M. Coetzee’s novel “Waiting for the Barbarians”, is reflective of these two situations. In the novel, war breaks out between an Empire and a group of nomads, the barbarians. In between all of this, is the protagonist, the magistrate, a man with a position of power in the military, who opposes the war. Much like actual war, there is an array of different psychological disorders portrayed through the characters, with some characters having disorders before

I always roamed about freely in the land that I once considered my tribes. Every neighboring tribe knew that those lands pertained to us and never did they fail to respect that. The tribes surrounding us were scarcely ever a problem, our problem was with towering, white men, who paraded themselves in dull red suits, and decided to alienate our territory.

Also, Wilson set this story in 1931 on a train from Vienna to Munich. This setting is well known as one rapidly intensifying towards the anti-semitistic views that took over in 1933 when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into power. Munich being one of the original locations of interest and power for the Nazi party. For someone reading this story for the first time they may or may not pick up on this allegorical reference to the Second World War, but when it is known we are shown a whole knew meaning to the story. Wilson hinted at this when he said “Many people slept until they reached Munich. Then they all began to wake up.”. This seems to suggest that people in this time were so focused on their personal economic issues that it took them a while to pay attention to the massed genocides that the Nazis began to commit once they had obtained power.

Current and past investigations often involve certain violence; however, sometimes, the accused receive “accidental” torture without much explanation. At times, such violence could happen upon the mood of the police or cell holders. In a story written by J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarian, the author writes to warn the future of the mistakes of the past and provides a simple solution to resolve problems without using physical power. Coetzee also advocates toward nonviolence activities through this book as he describes the unnecessary torture as ineffective, for such action showed to have solved little problems.

In J.M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians, a Magistrate and his outpost fall into turmoil subsequent to the Empire’s endeavor to subjugate the barbarians. The Magistrate believes that the Empirespecifically Captain Joll, a higher-ranking officialhas unscrupulously entered his area of power and unjustifiably tortures the barbarians so as to “interrogate” them. During the Empire’s effort to capture the barbarians and forcefully remove them from “their” land, the Magistrate struggles to understand both his and Captain Joll’s behavior as well as the true nature of the Empire. Though the Magistrate and Captain Joll together represent the Empire, they approach the realities of imperial rule discordantly. In

In J.M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians, a Magistrate and his outpost fall into turmoil subsequent to the Empire’s endeavor to subjugate the barbarians. The Magistrate believes that the Empirespecifically Captain Joll, a higher-ranking officialhas unscrupulously entered his area of power and unjustifiably tortures the barbarians so as to “interrogate” them. During the Empire’s effort to capture the barbarians and forcefully remove them from “their” land, the Magistrate struggles to understand both his and Captain Joll’s behavior as well as the true nature of the Empire. Though the Magistrate and Captain Joll together represent the Empire, they approach the realities of imperial rule discordantly. In other words, they are two