This study examines the question of the authorial authority of the early twentieth-century female writer Virginia Woolf and the contemporary male South African writer J. M. Coetzee. For these two authors, the ideal writer is the one who is emptied of her or his own beliefs, assertions, and prejudices. This paper argues that some of Woolf’s and Coetzee’s feminist narrative techniques, questioning the authority of the white female characters, Clarissa Dalloway and Susan Barton, serve to blur the boundaries between the Other and I in Mrs Dalloway and Foe. The characters’ failures to restore the silence of the Others is noteworthy because the Others’ independent resistance through their bodies and silences, paradoxically, subverts the dominant discourses and thereby makes the texts into homes, spaces of mediated communication for the oppressed Others. Hence, we can find the aesthetic and ethical significance of these two novels in that they urge us to share the pain of the Others and assume the responsibility for it voluntarily.