Proposal - Friday's Metamorphosis

I propose to write an article chronicling the metamorphosis of Friday’s relationship with Susan, Crusoe and Foe from the novel entitled Foe, by J.M. Coetzee, and to do it by using outlandish metaphor. Exploring his experiences via a long stream of creative metaphor during a dream which he is having after living in England for some time. The dream harkens him back to the foggy moments before his own shipwreck when he is no more than five years old, and the trauma of having his tongue removed is expressed in strikingly nightmarish, yet concealed ways; propelling the use of metaphor throughout my analysis. It continues from that point in semi-connected leaps of imagery and animal sounds, where Friday even views himself and Crusoe as types of animals. At the juncture where he meets Susan on the shore his dream takes a different turn, where he could possibly begin to see himself and Crusoe as more than animals among the other wildly behaving inhabitants of the island (i.e. the fauna AND flora)...though not quite. When he is “rescued” from the island he will not smile, cry, become angry, or grateful...but will observe (along with the reader) what is happening in his surroundings and his own behavior in a dreamlike fashion. The main division between this metaphorical rendition and Coetzee’s silent treatment of the character is that, while he remains unable or unwilling to express himself in words, the images, sounds and sensations of touch that could be imagined by him will be described via an outside, entirely non-omniscient narrator who is just as surprised (though a little less baffled?) as the reader is at the quantity and quality of spontaneous imagery to be decoded. By accentuating the use of metaphor to include sensations like pleasure, pain, touch, sound, and logical actions of the metaphors that stand for people in the dream I will make it a challenge for the reader to decipher whether this is a dream, or if Friday’s actual waking senses or thought-life is what is occurring. It will become a shortened version of the short book format, extending the periods of physical activity and wholly eliminating everyone’s feelings; being that he cannot accurately describe his own, but leaves it up to the metaphorical narration to explain “merely” what he does and what they do.