J. M. Coetzee's novel Foe is a postmodernist and postcolonial retelling of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Coetzee keeps some the main characters in Robinson Crusoe's novel- Cruso and an African named Friday, but makes two very important additions: the two authors of the novel are Susan Barton, a white woman who is shipwrecked on the island, and Mr. Foe, whose name is an obvious allusion to Daniel Defoe.
             The two new characters radically change the meanings inscribed in the book: first of all, Coetzee introduces a feminine figure in the man-centered, exclusivist world of Robinson Crusoe. With the presence of Susan Barton Coetzee also revises the image of the fallen woman as represented in the other two novels by Defoe: Moll Flanders and Roxana. Coetzee's revision of these other two books works as a feminist reading of Moll Flanders and Roxana, but as of Robinson Crusoe as well. Also, the presence of the author of Robinson Crusoe in the novel makes Coetzee's book into a postmodernist and deconstructive retelling of Defoe's book.
             Essentially, Foe is a story about writing, being and representation, about otherness and difference. The multiple authors in the story are a tribute to the postmodernist idea that all the voices in a story are equally legitimate or illegitimate. Susan Barton who is trying to tell her fantastic adventure on the deserted island, feels that she can not capture the substance of truth in her narrative and asks Mr. Foe, the author, to tell it for her:
             "'The island was Cruso's (yet by what right? by the law of islands? is there such a law?), but I lived there too, I was no bird of passage, no gannet or albatross, to circle the island once and dip a wing and then fly on over the boundless ocean. Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr. Foe: that is my entreaty. For though my story gives the truth, it does not give the substance of the truth (I see that clearly, we need not ...