First Impressions

Waiting for the Barbarians: A Quest for Truth?

So far in Waiting for the Barbarians, I have found the magistrate to be an interesting and somewhat perplexing character. He is extremely relatable for several reasons including the fact that I find myself also pitying the fisher folk that are living in the barracks. But more interestingly, my first impressions of the magistrate include those of admiration. He is constantly seeking truth and the existence a higher moral ground to be present in everything around him.

His pursuit of truth is apparent in his conversations with the colonel, in his conversations with the prisoners, and in his thoughts throughout the first section. For example, he asks the colonel on the subject of torture, “What if your prisoner is telling the truth yet finds he is not believed?...How do you ever know when a man has told you the truth?” (5). He continues stressing the importance of truth when he marvels at the colonel’s statement of the tone present in truth-speaking people when he says with a hint of sarcastic humor, “The tone of truth! Can you pick up this tone in everyday speech? Can you hear whether I am telling the truth?” (5). He gathers from this conversation an interesting idea: “Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt” (5).

The theme of truth appears several more times in this section. Once is when the magistrate is asking the boy about the confession he had made saying “Are you telling the truth?” (10) when he had previously told the boy that he “must tell the officer the truth. That is all he wants to hear—the truth” (7).

With his search for truth, the magistrate is simultaneously aspiring for a higher level of morality to be present around him. He clearly dislikes the colonel’s use of torture and the fact that the colonel brought in a bunch of fisher folk who were clearly not “barbarians” the magistrate had in mind. The magistrate also helps the first two prisoners by taking care of the boy’s wounds and making sure the father was disposed of properly.

In the first section, truth is an undeniably important theme. However, as the story progresses, is this quest for truth muddled up by other things?

And can the magistrate really be described as a seeker of truth? Or was that simply a quick interpretation of his character that can be proved inaccurate?

I am also curious whether or not the magistrate is really to create a higher moral ground in the things around him? Or is that also one of his characteristics only present in the first section? (440)