I Am Too Tired to Think of a Clever Title

I am always a sucker for extending literary criticism methods to everyday realities. It is for this reason that I am truly enjoying reading Waiting for the Barbarians back to back with Heart of Darkness; I love the perfect juxtaposition of style with the parallelism of theme. Heart of Darkness, as discussed in many of the articles brought up last week, is a book much dictated by the time it was written. For today’s readers, is limited by its own verbosity, its familiar narrative structure, and perhaps even its unknowing racism or sexism. These lenses (normal for the time it was written) detract from the book’s meaning for a modern interpreter. Waiting for the Barbarians, on the other hand, is a book perfectly fitted to our times. The kind of modernist edge apparent throughout the book makes it appealing to modern readers. These details are apparent in the author’s tone and style and even in the details of plot and setting.
Whereas Heart of Darkness is set in a very concrete time and place (it masquerades as a true story, with all the details in place to make it a believable true-life experience), Waiting for the Barbarians is very deliberately not placed in any concrete time or place. This serves, in a rather blatant way, to make the lessons available to be learned from the book even more apparently universal. Although it is easy to apply the book to the same colonialism as in Heart of Darkness, the author wishes us to perhaps keep a broader mindset. This same universality is set in place for the characters as well; not many have names. The characters are not really all good or all bad, but they are very human. Everything that happens seems kind of bumbling and awkward; there are no real heroes (so far, at least). The narrator does not even really know what he wants! His interest in the barbarian girl seems a little too sick to be either altruistic or truly romantic, but at the same time he is not really a bad guy.
So far, this story set in no place and no time has been rather interesting. I hope that the plain prose, modern style of writing, and interesting plot will continue to develop throughout the rest of the book.
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