Friday, November 9, 2012

Defoe's novel

Crusoe is forced into closing off, and in isolation he can be that much closer to idol because he is that much more than able to meditate and reach out a union with the infinite.

In "The Preface," Defoe makes reference to the bosh as worth publishing because of the lessons it teaches:

The Story is told with Modesty, with Seriousness, and with a religious act of Events to the Uses to which wise Men always apply them ( that is to say) to the Instruction of other(a)s by this Example, and to justify and honor the Wisdom of Providence in both the Variety of our Circumstances, let them happen how they will (1).

Much of what the girlish Crusoe's father tells him has an dry consequence in the way the story unfolds. His father warns him not to travel, for one thing, and certainly what happens to the young musical composition makes this advice expect timely. His father instead says he should stay shoes and enjoy a life of ease and pleasure, and the possibility of doing this is to be regarded as evidence of the level of civilization that has been achieved:

He told me, I might judge of the Happiness of this State, by this one thing, viz. That this was the State of Life which altogether other People envied, that Kings give birth frequently lamented the mi


serable Consequences of being natural to great things, and wish'd they had been placed in the Middle of the two Extremes, mingled with the Mean and the Great. . . (4).

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

At the same time, there is an ironic structure to this novel that recapitulates Christian themes. In going abroad, Crusoe disobeys his father. He must then be punished by promoter of the shipwreck and his subsequent travails, and he repents and achieves a strength he did not possess before. Crusoe in fact becomes more Christianized himself during his want period of isolation, communing with God and meditating on his life and his attitude.
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He becomes more attuned to the world around him and especially to the spiritual world as he suffers from an illness and then revels in his recovery:

Indeed, condition the long diatribe of his father, it is apparent that the young man goes against constantlyything that the other man says and save at the same time does so in a way that upholds the same values. Crusoe may seem to turn his back on a life of leisure, and yet he is forced to try to recreate that life not for its leisure but out of necessity. He seeks small luxuries on the island, but at the time they are not luxuries at all but necessities. There is irony in ever action he takes that tires to rebuild precisely what he has left-hand(a) behind, and yet he does so in isolation and not with the social position that has been key in his life in England. The father tells the young man that he should not " butterfly the young Man" and should not send himself into the miseries which his station in life has protected him against. His father seems quite prescient in his warning:

Crusoe finds himself on the beach surrounded by all that is left of his possessions, and he must shape those possessions into a coloration of the life he has known in England. He begins with a sense of being punished and thus with an attitude of pang and victimhood, but he im
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