the tale.

As the plot unfolds, protagonist and narrator Robinson Crusoe finds himself in conflict with his father. Robinson longs for a career at sea, but his father attempts to push him into a law career to live a modest, middle-class life because “the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind, but that the middle station had the fewest disasters”. The protagonist ignores his father’s counsel and embarks on a financially successful sea voyage. Upon Crusoe’s return, he is issued a stern warning:

God would not bless me, and I should have leisure hereafter to reflect upon having neglected his counsel when there might be none to assist in my recovery.

Crusoe is nearly persuaded:

I was sincerely affected with this discourse, and, indeed, who could be otherwise? and I resolved not to think of going abroad any more, but to settle at home according to my father's desire. But alas! a few days wore it all off; and, in short, to prevent any of my father's further importunities, in a few weeks after I resolved to run quite away from him.

Crusoe embarks on a second voyage and finds the warning to be prophetic. He is kidnapped by pirates and subsequently enslaved and brought to Africa. The reader sees the first glimpse of irony in the novel in that the protagonist sought the safe, good life as a sailor, but the sea nearly costs him his life.

Several examples of irony in the novel are evident in the protagonist’s lack of awareness of religious beliefs, which are so important to his father. While he seemingly hesitates to commit to religious doctrine, each time he finds himself in trouble or ill he prays to God for safety.

The narrator begins his journey with visions of grandeur he would find through sea voyages. His father hopes he will find success in a secure middle-class lifestyle. Instead, after being stranded on an island, he thinks of himself as a king in possession of vast acres of land and as master of the animals living there. He has experienced life as a slave and a slave master, ironically.

While there are numerous examples of irony in Robinson Crusoe, there are few so glaring as his initial relationship with Friday. After spending years in solitude craving human companionship, he fears Friday. Eventually, he accepts Friday as someone subservient to him.

Robinson Crusoe is a novel of self-discovery. Defoe cleverly uses the literary device of irony throughout the book as a method of highlighting the protagonist’s eventual self-awareness.

Defoe shows irony in Crusoe's fate on the desert island. Crusoe heads out impetuously looking for riches, only to find himself alone with next to nothing but what he can salvage from the sunken ship. Yet ironically, in the stark simplicity of his life on the island, he finds abundance unlike what he experienced when far more material goods were available. This causes him to reflect on life, writing,

All our discontents about what we want appeared to me to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.

Crusoe is in a situation which would to outside eyes seem an unfortunate stroke of luck, and yet in it he finds thankfulness and gratitude: the opposite of what we would expect, and hence ironic.

Crusoe also goes to sea in defiance of his father and the religious faith in which he was raised, yet ironically, like Jonah swallowed by the whale when he tries to escape his religious destiny, Crusoe is also metaphorically "swallowed up"—in his case, by an island. Crusoe, too, finds religion in the worst of situations, for he cannot avoid seeing the hand of Providence in his survival. He notes the irony:

How frequently, in the course of our lives, the evil which in itself we seek most to shun, and which, when we are fallen into, is the most dreadful to us, is oftentimes the very means or door of our deliverance, by which alone we can be raised again from the affliction we are fallen into.

The most powerful irony in this work, when read by a twenty-first century audience at least, is the stark discrepancy between Crusoe's religious conversion and his imperialist attitudes. While his spiritual rebirth on the island seems sincere, it is inconsistent with both his enslavement of Friday and his sense of natural superiority.