(toc) #title= (Table of Content)
Summary of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe:
D(caps)aniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is the adventures of Crusoe, the hero who insists on going in search of greener pastures abroad despite his parents' disapproval. The boy embarks on a series of adventures. His secret travel to Hull was his first voyage. Crusoe again went on board in a ship bound for the Coast of Africa vulgarly called the “Voyage to Guinea”. He took ill frequently from the excessive heat of the climate and fell into terrible misfortune. On the way towards the Canary Islands, the Turkish Rovers of Sallee overtook their ship, seized goods, materials, and men including Crusoe as a slave into the Sallee of the Moors. At Brazil, he honored the secret proposal of some of the Brazilian plantation merchants to buy Negro slaves for use and sale in their plantations. While on the voyage, their ship ran into raging storms that buried the ship and its crew. Crusoe is swept ashore on an Island, lonely, depressed. He relied on nature to survive. He built himself a house, domesticated goats, and made himself a boat. He describes the perturbation of his mind caused by a visit of cannibals, his rescue from death of an indigenous inhabitant he later names Man Friday, and finally, the coming of an English ship whose crew are in a state of mutiny. He helped the ship’s captain to subdue the mutineers, and Crusoe is rescued.
3.2 Themes:
Some of the themes in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe are explained below:
3.2.1 In search of Economic Empowerment:
Crusoe prefers the upper-class position that was more valuable in the period. At the age of twelve, the hero does not like to be identified with the lower or middle-class positions but the upper class of higher economy that is prestigious. Defoe’s hero wishes to improve his economic life desperately. He resists any attempt to be identified with the middle-class life. The hero desires to go to sea where he thinks he will be able to make quick wealth. He exhibits the characteristics of young Middle Englishmen and women who prefer to leave for overseas in search of greener pastures to avoid the less economically challenging English life that offers the English citizens less fulfillment. The novel reads: "My father, a wise and grave man, gave me serious and excellent counsel against what he foresaw was my design. He called me one morning into his chamber, where he was confined by the gout, and expostulated very warmly with me upon this subject. He asked me what reasons more than a mere wandering inclination I had for leaving my father’s house and my native country. He bids me observe it and that I should always find, that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower parts of mankind but that the middle station had the fewest disaster and was not exposed to so many vicissitudes" (p. 3).
3.2.2 Industrious:
The novelist takes his deviant hero, Crusoe, through the misfortune of ship wreckage on an isolated island where the situation demands that he must fashion a method to keep himself going on the isolated island. He planted maize, went on hunting expeditions and in the process, he caught his first non-human companion, a parrot bird he named Poll. He domesticates animals, bakes bread within his first two years on the Island. He made a ladder, an axe from hardwood, carved wood into a shovel, and shaped a gun suitable for hunting, built a kitchen with rafters. He toiled nights and days. The hardworking hero explains: "I found a tree of hardwood, or like it which in the Brazils they call the iron tree, for its exceeding hardness, of this with great labor and almost spooling my axe, cut a piece, and brought it home too with difficulty enough, for it was exceedingly heavy" (p.73). Defoe uses his hero to teach hard work which was a prevailing attitude of the English of the age of Augustans.
3.2.3 Gains of Prayer:
Defoe reminds us of the moral and spiritual philosophy of Catholicism in Neo-Classical England of his time (p.86). On the Island, he took ill frequently. He could not stand erect, very weak; he contemplates death, seeing his present predicament with no help in view on a lonely island. Crusoe had to pray to God repeatedly. The hero’s prayer had positive effects on him. Crusoe survived his ordeal by praying repeatedly.
3.2.4 Consequences of Disobedience:
Crusoe’s father warned him against overseas travels. Afterward, he sneaked away secretly to Hull with a friend, Bob. Immediately the ship sailed, they were overtaken by a great storm. Crusoe regrets his first sea experience and vowed that if he survives the storm, he will go home to his father like a repentant prodigal and will never venture into the sea: “I would like a true repenting prodigal go home to my father” (p.8). Contrary to the vow he made, as soon as the weather cleared, the crews drank over it and he forgot the bad experience and vow he made to return home. The sixth day, they arrived at Yarmouth roads where their ship anchored, briefly just as the ship from Newcastle also anchored at the common harbor to avoid the bad weather. He was enslaved during his voyage experience and later shipwrecked, swept ashore on an Island. Perhaps, if he had obeyed his parents he may not have been involved in such penalty or suffer the degrees of deprivation and torture.
3.2.5 Suffering and Endurance:
Less than 150 miles South of Sallee beyond the Emperor of Morocco’s Dominican, Crusoe endured the gale of wild apprehension with the Moors and wild creatures, monstrous beasts, fearful sight of boars, encounter with savages around the Island of the Canaries and Cape Verde Island.
3.3 Style:
Below is a discussion of the style of the novelist.
3.3.1 Language:
Daniel Defoe’s language struggles to give the details of his story. This is evident from the first page of the novel to the end. He tries to expand every minute fact he creates. Rather than consider this style as a problem, it aids and strengthens the reader’s knowledge of the novel. It also bridges the likely gap between the readers and the story, and makes the novel real than mere fiction that it is. Such makes readers enter into Defoe’s world at the various levels of life experiences.
3.3.2 Detailed description:
There are many instances of detailed descriptive use of language by Defoe in his novel. He also evokes details in a situation that his characters are closely identified with them and live through the experience in very realistic ways. He uses long sentences in Anglo-Saxon expression. This partly may be as a result of his experience as a journalist. Such sentences are often clumsy, and very long, it was by a whisker that Defoe’s story escapes being boring, but for his ability or mastery at weaving words together so beautifully and skillfully. An example of this begins the novel: "I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that Country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull: He got a good Estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznear; but by the usual corruption of words in England, we are now called, ney have call ourselves and Our name Crusoe, and so my companion always called me (p.1).
3.3.3 Allusion:
Daniel Defoe beautifies his story with the use of a series of allusions; from classical to natural geographical and biblical allusions. Examples of the natural allusions used in the novel are “shore”, “water”, “and Hills”, “sea” “island”, “wood”, “parrot” “tree” “corn”, “tiger” “lion”, “wild pigeon”, “storm”, “wild beasts” “weather”, “day and night” coast”, “rocks”, “grove”. Some references to the holy Bible book are “God”, “dream”, “Angel”, “prayed”. Also, examples of Classical allusion evident in the novel are as follows: “emperor”, “Negroes”, “Carpe de verde”, “Morocco”, “Canaries”, “Pico of Teneriffe”, “Moors”, “Gambia”, “Senegal”, Greek, “Cape of Augustino”, “River Amazon”, Barbados”. Examples of Geographical allusion used are “10 or 12 degrees of Northern Latitude”, “22 degrees of longitude difference,” “11 degree North Latitude”. The spread of the allusion suggests how comprehensive or detailed the novel is.
3.3.4 Symbolism:
Daniel Defoe’s use of symbols has helped to concretize his various themes and make his discourse cinematographic. His first human companion on the island, Man Friday, was so named by Crusoe in accordance with the English tradition of naming a baby according to the actual day of birth. To Crusoe, he named the Cannibal “Man Friday” “because he was saved on a Friday” to justify his rebirth from a cannibal-happy tribe to Catholicism or the rational English people whom Crusoe represents. Naturally, the savage “Man Friday” deserves to be renamed as a symbol of spiritual form of baptism, spiritual transformation from the human eater race of cannibals to Christian bible-believing race that England stands for.
All of these symbolize Britain’s racial superiority as a leading human race in the world with the best attitude to life, and with the English language that should be a world-class language. As a result, Crusoe quickly begins to educate Man Friday, teaches him how to pronounce some English words using the English accent. And gradually, he is acculturated and thought to embrace the new religion, Christianity. This also gives Defoe’s hero the role of a missionary who must take Christianity to the savage and civilize them accordingly. Defoe’s “Poll” in the novel symbolizes freedom of expression that is guaranteed in England.
3.3.5 Stylistic Strength of Extended Narrative:
Defoe has the strength for extended storytelling. This is seen in the vigorous and unwavering ways in which his story is woven together and connected without leaving the reader bored or wandering within it. The plausibility and racy nature of the story are the creative power of the storyteller. He wastes no time before recalling and presenting the next event he feels he should tell his reader. For instance, as the reader is taken through the hero’s (boy’s) attempt to convince his parents to let him go abroad, hardly had one taken a breath when Crusoe meets his old friend, Bob, and embarks on a voyage, elopes to London. There and then, the story rolls on with suspense in a flash as one would watch movies. The next page of experience opens, then another, and another, rolling over the other. Even at that, the story offers the reader no chance to rest as the events in the Defoe’s Island are creatively designed to get one glued to the pages of the novel till the hero is finally rescued from the desert.
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