Robinson Crusoe Page 0,1

sooner is the ordeal over than Crusoe is back, founding a colony and counting his money; and in the same way, the Crusoe idea continued, producing sequels and parodies, giving words to the language—‘‘Crusoe’’ is a byword for castaway, as ‘‘Friday’’ is a synonym for helper.

Robinson begins life as a disobedient and hubristic, if accident-prone boy. He is given any amount of advice by his sententious father, the German immigrant to England, Herr Kreutznaer, who anglicized his name to Crusoe. The name change is a nice touch in a book full of detail, which is the more plausible for its being strange and even somewhat unnecessary. But as it happens, Defoe also changed his name, Frenchifying it, for his father’s name was plain Mr. Foe. Daniel Defoe was anything but average, but he chose to write about a pretty ordinary, though arrogant, young man who (ignoring his father’s Teutonic and pedestrian sermon on the safety of staying home) leaves home and finds himself involved in extraordinary events, beginning just days after his departure, when on his first voyage, his ship sinks. He is not deterred, and not even put off by a fairly prescient man who looks him in the eye and says that wherever he goes he ‘‘will meet with nothing but disasters and disappointments.’’

Soon after, battling sea monsters, Crusoe is saved by his servant Xury; instead of rewarding him for his efforts, he sells Xury into slavery, and it is only when he is a harassed planter in Brazil that he regrets selling Xury, for he realizes that he could use a slave to help him in his work. He thinks of Xury again in this way on the island. That crudely human logic is one of the most plausible aspects of the novel; and it frequently gives rise to Crusoe’s refrain that he can’t seem to do anything right. He even claims in this early stage that as a tobacco farmer in rural Brazil he is living ‘‘like a man cast away upon some desolate island, that had no body there but himself.’’

A few pages later, in one of Defoe’s calculated ironies, Crusoe is shipwrecked on a slaving expedition, and begins to understand the reality behind his desert-island hyperbole, as he becomes a real castaway on an island of real desolation. There is no question that Defoe intended a morality tale, but as a prolific writer (four hundred works bear his name), he was well-enough acquainted with the public taste to know that for his story to be believed it needed persuasive detail. Crusoe is not high-minded. He is a rebellious son who is attracted to the risky and the morally doubtful. He is inexperienced, not a Londoner but a young provincial, a Yorkshireman. That he is from a reasonably well-off family makes him seem out of touch and a bit innocent; he keeps reminding us how average he is in being incompetent (‘‘I had never handled a tool in my life’’), and accident prone (‘‘I that was born to be my own destroyer’’), and he is not at all religious until he finds a Bible among the tools and seeds and paraphernalia he rescues from the smashed ship.

He survives by growing and maturing; but he does more than survive—he ends by ruling the island, by becoming if not wise, then sensible; by acquiring power and using it with understanding. He progresses from being an almost-victim to an almost-dictator. One of the most satisfying aspects of the novel is that in order to prevail over the natural obstacles of his island, Crusoe has to learn the rudiments of civilization. For this to happen he must become acquainted with the paradox that his desert island is both a prison and a kingdom—he uses those very words. Early on, he describes himself as a prisoner and describes his anguish. Later he speaks of ‘‘the sixth year of my reign, or my captivity, which you please.’’ After some time passes and his confidence grows, his hut is a ‘‘castle,’’ and with the appearance (and conversion from cannibalism) of Friday, he thinks of himself as a ruler. At last, with his rescue of the Spaniards and Friday’s father he says, ‘‘My island was now peopled and I thought myself very rich in subjects; and it was a merry reflection which I frequently made, How like a king I looked.’’ And he thinks of himself as an absolute ruler and even a despot, but a benevolent one.

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