J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and the embodiment of meaning

The last chapter of J.M. Coetzee’s Foe is well known for its impenetrability. Drawing upon cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, this essay argues that the chapter can be interpreted as a metafictional allegory of the reader’s making sense of the novel. The embodiment of the character-narrator (a fictional counterpart for the reader) is central to the allegory. Coetzee’s novel lays bare the embodied nature of meaning-making, showing that interpretation is grounded in patterns of bodily interaction with an environment similar to the patterns traced by the narrator of Foe’s final pages.