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Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (The Necessity of Repentance (It is not…
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Key facts
Major conflict · Shipwrecked alone, Crusoe struggles against hardship, privation, loneliness, and cannibals in his attempt to survive on a deserted island.
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Crusoe narrates in both the first and third person, presenting what he observes. Crusoe occasionally describes his feelings, but only when they are overwhelming. Usually he favors a more factual narrative style focused on actions and events.
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It was written in1719, London, England.
Crusoe’s tone is mostly detached, meticulous, and objective. He displays little rhetorical grandeur and few poetic or colorful turns of phrase. He generally avoids dramatic storytelling, preferring an inventorylike approach to the facts as they unfold.
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He very rarely registers his own feelings, or those of other characters, and only does so when those feelings affect a situation directly.
Counting and Measuring
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He does not simply tell us that his hedge encloses a large space, but informs us with a surveyor’s precision.
He tells us not simply that he spends a long time making his canoe, but that it takes precisely twenty days to fell the tree and fourteen to remove the branches.
It is not just an immense tree, but is “five foot ten inches in diameter at the lower part . . .
Furthermore, time is measured with similar exactitude, as Crusoe’s journal shows.
All these examples of counting and measuring underscore Crusoe’s practical, businesslike character and his hands-on approach to life.
But Defoe sometimes hints at the futility of Crusoe’s measuring—as when the carefully measured canoe cannot reach water or when his obsessively kept calendar is thrown off by a day of oversleeping.
Defoe may be subtly poking fun at the urge to quantify, showing us that, in the end, everything Crusoe counts never really adds up to much and does not save him from isolation.
Eating
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In a way, these images of eating convey Crusoe’s ability to integrate the island into his life, just as food is integrated into the body to let the organism grow and prosper.
Life for Crusoe always illustrates this eat or be eaten philosophy, since even back in Europe he is threatened by man-eating wolves.
For example, his cultivation of raisins, almost a luxury food for Crusoe, marks a new comfortable period in his island existence.
His securing of goat meat staves off immediate starvation, and his discovery of grain is viewed as a miracle, like manna from heaven.
Eating is an image of existence itself, just as being eaten signifies death for Crusoe.
He soon provides himself with food, and indeed each new edible item marks a new stage in his mastery of the island, so that his food supply becomes a symbol of his survival.
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Ordeals at Sea
All the life-testing water imagery in the novel has subtle associations with the rite of baptism, by which Christians prove their faith and enter a new life saved by Christ.
The Spanish shipwreck reminds Crusoe of the destructive power of water and of his own good fortune in surviving it.
But the sea remains a source of danger and fear even later, when the cannibals arrive in canoes.
Most significantly, Crusoe survives his shipwreck after a lengthy immersion in water.
His escape from his Moorish master and his successful encounter with the Africans both occur at sea.
Then, in his first trading voyage, he proves himself a capable merchant, and in his second one, he shows he is able to survive enslavement.
First, the storm off the coast of Yarmouth frightens Crusoe’s friend away from a life at sea, but does not deter Crusoe.
Crusoe’s encounters with water in the novel are often associated not simply with hardship, but with a kind of symbolic ordeal, or test of character.
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