Alternative History in Coetzee’s Foe

The present paper tends to investigate the im/possibility of historical narratives in terms of Hayden White’s historiography and Barthes’ erciture/écrivance opposition in Coetzee’s Foe to argue that how a completed historical narrative remains inconclusive. It aims to figure out why in Whitian terms, Coetzee’s Foe cannot complete the process of transformation from an “archive” into a “narrative;” or in the case of any progress, it cannot go beyond a “chronicle;”and why any effort taken by Foe and Susan in this regard is aborted. To do so, it is also necessary to ask why the concepts of plausibility, relationship and categorization which, according to White, are prerequisite of composing an aesthetically and ideologically acceptable historical narrative cannot be realized in terms of intermental cognitive pairs.