Robinson Crusoe

259 Pages·2008·1.55 MB·English

by  Daniel Defoe

Table of Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Preface
I Go to Sea
I Am Captured by Pirates
I Escape from the Sallee Rover
I Become a Brazilian Planter
I Go on Board in an Evil Hour
I Furnish Myself with Many Things
I Build My Fortress
The Journal
I Sow My Grain
I Travel Quite Across the Island
I Am Very Seldom Idle
I Make Myself a Canoe
I Improve Myself in the Mechanic Exercises
I Find the Print of a Man’s Naked Foot
I See the Shore Spread with Bones
I Seldom Go from My Cell
I See the Wreck of a Ship
I Hear the First Sound of a Man’s Voice
I Call Him Friday
We Make Another Canoe
We March Out Against the Cannibals
We Plan a Voyage to the Colonies of America
We Quell a Mutiny
We Seize the Ship
I Find My Wealth All About Me
We Cross the Mountains
I Revisit My Island
Afterword
Selected Bibliography
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) lived a life full of business successes and reverses,
financial gains and losses, and political victories and defeats. Sent by his father
to study for the ministry, Defoe entered the business world instead. In 1685,
Defoe took part in the Duke of Monmouth’s illfated rebellion against King
James II; and in 1688, he joined a volunteer regiment that acted as William III’s
escort into London. By 1692, Defoe’s business affairs had foundered and
creditors filed suit against him, but he talked his way out of debtors’ prison. His
poem The True-Born Englishman (1701) met with resounding success. In 1702,
after he attacked the Tories in a pamphlet, the enraged government imprisoned
him for two years; upon his release, he became a secret agent for the
government. Between 1718 and 1723 he published Robinson Crusoe, Moll
Flanders, and A Journal of the Plague Year.
Paul Theroux is the award-winning author of such novels as Picture Palace
(winner of the Whitbread Prize for fiction) , The Mosquito Coast, My Secret
History, Saint Jack, and Kowloon Tong. He has also published numerous best-
selling travel books, including The Great Railway Bazaar, The Kingdom by the
Sea, and The Pillars of Hercules.
Robert Mayer is Professor of British Literature and Director of the Screen
Studies Program at Oklahoma State University. He is the author of History and
the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe and the editor of
Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen. His recent work includes the essay
‘‘Robinson Crusoe in Hollywood’’ and an ongoing study of authorship and
reading that focuses on Sir Walter Scott.
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First Signet Classics Printing (Mayer Afterword), May 2008
Introduction copyright © Paul Theroux, 1998
Afterword copyright © Robert Mayer, 2008
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Introduction
Robinson Crusoe, an adventure story of the ultimate castaway, is so established
in most people’s minds that even those who have not read it know some details
of the story: Shipwreck. Desert island. Goatskin jacket and funny hat. Hairy
umbrella. Talking parrot. Shocking footprint. Man Friday. Cannibals. Rescue. It
is all so familiar as an apparently simple, wonderful tale of survival that it is
easily read as a great yarn.
Crusoe is too human and accident prone to be truly heroic—this may be
another reason for his enduring appeal. But the island setting is also a
compelling feature of his story, for the island as a microcosm of the world has
been used imaginatively in English in works as diverse as Shakespeare’s The
Tempest and Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Crusoe is more stubborn than brave,
and his first-person narrative, the more believable for being defiantly unliterary,
can be appreciated as the account of a man’s twenty-eight-year ordeal of
loneliness, hunger, and physical threat; a man who ingeniously succeeds against
the odds. But it is all so assured and so filled with plausible episodes and
peculiar wisdom, it helps to be reminded that it was the first English novel and
was written by a man nearly sixty, who resembled his fictional creation in his
need to scheme in order to survive. Defoe was a master of improvisation, and he
had to be, for his life was a chronicle of ups and downs—which is a fair
description of this novel.
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) was, in the words of one critic, ‘‘a shrewd, shifty,
ingenious man, much mistrusted and frequently imprisoned.’’ He was
imprisoned for debt as well as for his satirical writing, and his reverses included
bankruptcy and the failure of get-rich-quick schemes, of which raising civet cats
(their glands were used for perfume) for quick cash was just one. He was a
journalist, publisher, poet, businessman, and sometime secret agent, whose first
novel—the first in the English language—was a huge hit, running into many
editions and being quickly pirated and imitated.
One of the reasons for the success of this piece of fiction was that it was taken
for fact. It is utterly, vulgarly modern in that sense. In the preface, Defoe,
wearing the mask of editor, wrote, ‘‘The editor believes the thing to be a just
history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it.’’ Defoe (who took
the view that fiction could be a low and subversive trick that encouraged
mendacity) had hit upon an idea that persists to this day—that if a book is said to
be true, it is somehow a more important and authentic piece. ‘‘A true story, based
on actual events,’’ runs the assertion in the made-for -TV movie. ‘‘It really
happened!’’ the person says, who urges you to read such a book. That was also
what Defoe wanted people to say in 1719 when Robinson Crusoe was first
published; and they did say it and believed it.
The story is sensational—even today a story about such a castaway would be
front-page news. But with time and rereading this adventure deepens in
meaning, and the longer you live, the more impressive an achievement Robinson
Crusoe becomes, turning from amazing tale to a subtle study in innovation, a
metaphor for human survival, and ultimately one of our own mythical tales,
almost Biblical in its morality: Robinson is as vivid and unambiguous a
character as Job or Jonah, two people he specifically mentions.
And surely it is significant that the very first English novel is a desert island
story, just one man in the middle of nowhere, with almost nothing, who survives
to create a whole world. In this sense the novel is like an allegory of the history
of humankind. The narrative emerges from chaos, with no society or props to
speak of. A whole metaphor of creation is described in this book, which is as
surprising in its action as in its intelligence. Its contradictions are the
contradictions in the lives of many people; it embodies many of our discontents
and dilemmas. No women figure in its drama; there is no passion, and though
there is affection, there is hardly any love. But in its understated way the novel
discusses just about everything else—materialism, isolation, arrogance, travel,
friendship, imperialism, rebellious children, the relativity of wealth, the
conundrum of power, the ironies of solitude, learning by doing; it is about faith,
atonement, and the passage of time. It is also as practical as a pair of shoes. No
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)