Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe

a journey into Daniel Defoe's novel

Francesco Michele Brunetti Fabio Valerio Germano Morisco

Daniel Defoe

Novelist, pamphleteer and journalist, Daniel Defoe is considered one of the founders of the English novel. He was born in London in 1660 to a family of Noncomformists, also called “Dissenters” – Protestant groups separated from the church of England. His father was the typical lower class man with a sound Protestant religious spirit and deep sense of responsibility.Although Defoe did not attend university, he received a good education, and in his early twenties set up as a merchant. In 1692 Defoe went bankrupt, and this marked the beginning of a lifelong struggle with debts and fear of prison. This experience, however, gave him a deep understanding of the outcasts of society, like thieves and adventurers. He expressed his views in numerous pamphlets. Defoe was arrested, fined and condemned to the pillory. Because he was unable to pay the fine he was imprisoned, but he was soon released.From this moment on Defoe worked for the government as a secret agent; he wrote reports, pamphlets, and travelled widely; he also worked for actively as a journalist. As a dissenter and a representative of the middle class, Defoe could not but support the Hanoverians succession. He also wrote on current affairs, religion, and various subjects, and his prose was so effective that he is considered the father of modern journalism. It was only in 1719 that he wrote Robin Crusoe. This book became immensely popular, and was widely translated and limitaed. It particularly appealed to the middle and lower classes, who identified themselves with the hero.1722 saw the publication of some masterpieces: Moll Flanders, A Journal of the plague Year, Colonel Jack. Moll Flanders is perhaps the most interesting of his novels, after Robin Crusoe. In spite of declining health Defoe continued his incessant activities and his last novel, Roxana, appeared in 1724. Daniel Defoe died in 1731.

Plot

Twelve years pass in this way, until one momentous day, Crusoe finds a single human footprint in the sand! But he has to wait another ten years before he discovers the key to the mystery: natives from the nearby islands, who practise cannibalism, have visited the island, and when they next return, Crusoe attacks them, using his musket salvaged from the shipwreck all those years ago. He takes one of the natives captive, and names him Man Friday, because – according to Crusoe’s (probably inaccurate) calendar, that’s the day of the week on which they first meet.

The novel, famously, is about how the title character, Robinson Crusoe, becomes marooned on an island off the north-east coast of South America. As a young man, Crusoe had gone to sea in the hope of making his fortune. Crusoe is on a ship bound for Africa, where he plans to buy slaves for his plantations in South America, when the ship is wrecked on an island and Crusoe is the only survivor. Alone on a desert island, Crusoe manages to survive thanks to his courage and pragmatism. He keeps himself sane by keeping a diary, manages to build himself a shelter, and find a way of salvaging useful goods from the wrecked ship, including guns.

Before the ship can leave, Crusoe has teamed up with the captain and his men, and between them they retake the ship from the mutineers, who settle on the island while Crusoe takes the ship home to England.Robinson Crusoe has been away from England for many years by this stage – he was marooned on his island for over twenty years – and his parents have died. But he has become wealthy, thanks to his plantations in Brazil, so he gets married and settles down. His wife dies a few years later, and Crusoe – along with Friday – once again leaves home.

Plot

Crusoe teaches Man Friday English and converts him to Christianity. When Crusoe learns that Man Friday’s fellow natives are keeping white prisoners on their neighbouring island, he vows to rescue them. Together, the two of them build a boat. When more natives attack the island with captives, Crusoe and Friday rescue the captives and kill the natives. The two captives they’ve freed are none other than Friday’s own father and a Spanish man. Crusoe sends them both off to the other island in the newly made boat, telling them to free the other prisoners. Meanwhile, a ship arrives at the island: a mutiny has taken place on board, and the crew throw the captain and his loyal supporters onto the island

Main characters

Friday

A twenty-six-year-old Caribbean native and cannibal who converts to Protestantism under Crusoe’s tutelage. Friday becomes Crusoe’s servant after Crusoe saves his life when Friday is about to be eaten by other cannibals. Friday never appears to resist or resent his new servitude, and he may sincerely view it as appropriate compensation for having his life saved. But whatever Friday’s response may be, his servitude has become a symbol of imperialist oppression throughout the modern world. Friday’s overall charisma works against the emotional deadness that many readers find in Crusoe.

Robinson Crusoe

The novel’s protagonist and narrator. Crusoe begins the novel as a young middle-class man in York in search of a career. He father recommends the law, but Crusoe yearns for a life at sea, and his subsequent rebellion and decision to become a merchant is the starting point for the whole adventure that follows. His vague but recurring feelings of guilt over his disobedience color the first part of the first half of the story and show us how deep Crusoe’s religious fear is. Crusoe is steady and plodding in everything he does, and his perseverance ensures his survival through storms, enslavement, and a twenty-eight-year isolation on a desert island.

The Spaniard and Xury

Main characters

The Spaniard is one of the men from the Spanish ship that is wrecked off Crusoe’s island, and whose crew is rescued by the cannibals and taken to a neighboring island. The Spaniard is doomed to be eaten as a ritual victim of the cannibals when Crusoe saves him. In exchange, he becomes a new “subject” in Crusoe’s “kingdom,” at least according to Crusoe. Xury is a nonwhite (Arab or Black) slave boy only briefly introduced during the period of Crusoe’s enslavement in Sallee. When Crusoe escapes with two other slaves in a boat, he forces one to swim to shore but keeps Xury on board, showing a certain trust toward the boy. Xury never betrays that trust. Nevertheless, when the Portuguese captain eventually picks them up, Crusoe sells Xury to the captain. Xury’s sale shows us the racist double standards sometimes apparent in Crusoe’s behavior.

The Portuguese captain

The sea captain who picks up Crusoe and the slave boy Xury from their boat after they escape from their Moorish captors and float down the African coast. The Portuguese captain takes Crusoe to Brazil and thus inaugurates Crusoe’s new life as plantation owner. The Portuguese captain is never named—unlike Xury, for example—and his anonymity suggests a certain uninteresting blandness in his role in the novel. He is polite, personable, and extremely generous to Crusoe, buying the animal skins and the slave boy from Crusoe at well over market value. He is loyal as well, taking care of Crusoe’s Brazilian investments even after a twenty-eight-year absence. His role in Crusoe’s life is crucial, since he both arranges for Crusoe’s new career as a plantation owner and helps Crusoe cash in on the profits later.

Novel Themes

Self-Reliance

Robinson Crusoe is at its core a story of adventure, and true to its nature the hero must rely upon his wits and courage to survive. Throughout the novel readers see this theme in action. Robinson Crusoe chooses the right moment to escape from his slave master and thinks quickly to push the Moor accompanying him on the boat overboard. He demonstrates self-reliance in building his plantation in Brazil. And most clearly and indefatigably, he uses his self-reliance to survive on the island. Defoe goes to extraordinary lengths to tell how Crusoe sorts through the goods on the wrecked ship to find just what he needs to survive and how he builds his rafts to bring it all ashore. It describes how he builds his castle for both comfort and defense. Crusoe has few materials available to him, but he manages to use what he does have in creative ways to build a comfortable and safe home on the island.

Progress and Christianity

During his time on the island, Crusoe moves from pure survival in the wild to hunting and farming, which raises him to a kind of relative prosperity. He makes his own tools and furniture, domesticates animals, plants crops, and eventually even establishes a small colony on his island as he gathers about him various groups of castaways and natives. The kind of progress and mobility he is able to achieve was rare in the England of his day. Crusoe relies on God to take care of him and also fears God's punishment for abandoning his family and for his lack of faith and gratitude on past occasions. He finds his quality of life improves as his faith in God becomes stronger, and this motivates him to continue. He begins to believe that God has placed him on the earth for a reason, and he initially thinks that because he alone (of all the crew and passengers on the two ships) has survived shipwrecks that God must therefore have some purpose for him. Later in Chapter 18, as he tries to encourage the English captain to take action to recover his ship, Crusoe asks, "And where, sir ... is your belief of my being preserved here on purpose to save your life?"One of the more provocative chapters in the text (Chapter 15) has Crusoe teaching this faith to Friday, who is a quick study, and soon seems to become as devoted a Christian as Crusoe. But Friday also asks questions that Crusoe finds difficult to answer. Friday asks, "Why God no kill the devil, so make him no more do wicked?" Crusoe stumbles over the answer but continues his teaching. In the end he realizes that in teaching Christianity to Friday, he has become a better and more understanding Christian himself. However, at the end of the novel he decides against resettling in Brazil, in part because he does not wish to live among Catholics.

Nature

In Robinson Crusoe, nature is one of the chief actors in guiding the plot. It is nature that blows Crusoe's ship onto the sand near the island and that casts Crusoe alone of all the men on that ship onto the shores of the island. It is nature that provides calm seas so Crusoe can salvage all the tools, food, and other supplies from the wrecked ship. It is nature that wrecks the Spaniard's ship, and later on that sends the wolves and bear to attack Crusoe's party as they journey to England. It is also nature that provides all the plenty that Crusoe enjoys on the island, from the goats that nourish him to the parrot that keeps him company to the seeds that grow and become the source of much of his food during his years on the island. Crusoe learns during the novel that nature can provide bounty if cultivated—or destruction, if not treated with caution. Crusoe discovers that even his most diligent work cannot overcome some of the forces of nature, which he comes to believe strongly over the course of his time on the island is God's hand at work.

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