The process of self-confrontation in the first three novels reaches a kind of plateau in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). This is signalled through the idea of a personal awakening – that which is ultimately beyond Magda's reach in In the Heart of the Country, but which becomes a determining structural feature in this novel.

Waiting for the Barbarians crystallizes the central issue of debate concerning the ethical vision of Coetzee's fiction, and his importance as a novelist. This novel about the destructiveness (and self-destructiveness) of an imperial regime – obstructed by one man of conscience – has obvious ramifications for the white opponent of apartheid South Africa in 1980, the year of publication. The parallels, however, are vague in that the time and place of the novel's setting are imprecise. At one level, this is an allegory of imperialism and, as such, it inevitably widens its significance. Yet, if the parallel political situations are various, the novel may still be shown to have its compositional roots in a set of specific responses to contemporary South African concerns, and it is this achieved duality which lends credibility and resonance to the allegorical style: through a broadening and questioning of its one-to-one significance, the novel reinvigorates the allegorizing impulse.

The novel centres on a frontier outpost in an unknown land at an unknown time, a settlement – a walled town – under the auspices of the portentously termed ‘Empire’. The omission of the definite article helps to widen the connotations of ‘Empire’, which becomes available as an emblem of imperialism through history.