What is the meaning or significance of the faceless children playing in the snow in Waiting for the Barbarians by Coetzee? What does it represent?

The blank faces of the children in the repeated dream are ambiguous in their meaning to some degree. One way to explain the blankness is to connect it to the conclusion that the magistrate comes to in the end of the narrative.

After going to great lengths to separate himself from the society of the empire (by resisting Colonel Joll’s initiatives, by embarking on a mission to return the nameless barbarian girl to her people, and finally by spending time as a prisoner of the empire), the magistrate realizes that his attempts have been fruitless.

He is intimately and intractably connected to the society (the culture and the history) of the empire. He relies on this society for the whole of his identity.

“I wanted to live outside history. I wanted to live outside the history that Empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects. I never wished it for the barbarians that they should have the history of the Empire laid upon them.”

At this point, the magistrate has already come to accept the fact that he was unable to understand the barbarian girl. This was not just a matter of language issue. It was something deeper.

The “something deeper” here is arguably what we are seeing expressed in the dreams. By placing this inability to connect with “the other” into a dream, Coetzee offers a suggestion that the magistrate is fundamentally incapable of identifying with the barbarian girl.

The simple fact that the girl is never named in the text also underscores the sense that there is a chasm - - derived from vastly different histories - - that exists between the magistrate and the barbarian girl (and the barbarians in general). No amount of sympathy or conscious choice can remove the magistrate from the framework and boundaries of his history. Not even in dreams can he find a way to truly recognize “the other” in a way that would allow him to complete his task of empathy (with the barbarians) and severance (from the empire).

The magistrate muses on ideas of history, thinking about the reed slips he has been collecting and about the barbarians.

“There has been something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it.”

He cannot decipher the meaning(s) of the symbols on the slips. When, at one point, the magistrate see the girls face in his dream, he sees it as a child’s face. He cannot see her as a person with a history of her own.

This may be considered as one of the animating conflicts in the text. The magistrate strongly desires to know the girl. He wants to understand how she came to be as she is when he meets her. Through partial stories, he has a sense of her but never anything more.

She is indecipherable, like the reed slips and like the children in the dream, and belongs to a different history. For the magistrate, a stricken conscience is not enough to to undo what must be undone in order to achieve the understanding he seeks.