Waiting for the Barbarians

J. M. Coetzee

"What if your prisoner is telling the truth," I ask, "yet finds he is not believed? IS that not a terrible position? Imagine: to be prepared to yield, to yield, to have nothing more to yield, to be broken, yet to be pressed to yield more! And what a responsibility for the interrogator! How do you ever know when a man has told you the truth?"

On every face around me, even those that are smiling, I see the same expression: not hatred, not bloodlust, but a curiosity so intense that their bodies are drained by it and only their eyes live, organs of a new and ravening appetite.

Don't read this if you wish to come away with an uplifted heart and a joyful countenance. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians is a troubling read.
It's troubling because innocent people are tortured; it is troubling because the people you thought were good stand by and do nothing; it is troubling because there is no reason for the violence evil men perpetrate on others; it is troubling because it doesn't reveal too many redemptive qualities in humanity; it is troubling because it incriminates you and me.
Coetzee points out the ease with which we will close our ears, eyes, and minds to the evil we know to be going on all around us. His Magistrate is contemptible and repulsive because he takes so long to stand up, but if you have the courage to look yourself in the face once you've finished you have to acknowledge that you aren't much better. While I was reading, I was outraged that the Magistrate would stand by as injustice is flagrant before his nose--there is a particular scene where he notices a baby among some prisoners: "The baby cries and coughs, cries and coughs till I flee for the refuge to the farthest corner of my apartment...But I do nothing. Then one day I notice that the baby has stopped crying"...............................--how can a man stand by when a child is being killed and do nothing? The answer, terrifyingly enough, is quite easily. A more troubling question is: how can such a man call himself good?
But the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians does act, much to his own peril. In a horrifying scene of public violence he confronts the public over their choice for evil. It may take the Magistrate most of the novel, but he does recognize that he cannot continue to ignore the injustice. And now the most troubling part of the story: it was so easy to criticize this cowardly old official, I didn't even need to ask where I was far more guilty than he.
The grand punch-line of the novel, or at least it's most blatant line, comes about late at night as the Magistrate confronts the fleeing torturer and says, "The crime that is latent in us we must inflict on ourselves, not on others." While this may feel like an easy sentence to understand, I would caution you to read Waiting for the Barbarians before you rest content with your interpretation of it. If you refuse this, think at least about these words with which Coetzee ends the novel:

I think: "There has been something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it."