Discussion Topic
Robinson Crusoe's Character Development Analysis
Summary:
In Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe's character evolves significantly through his isolation and struggles on a deserted island. Initially driven by greed and indifferent to morality, engaging in the slave trade, Crusoe experiences a profound transformation following a religious conversion. His survival instincts lead him to self-reliance and practical skills, while his moral development is marked by reflection, repentance, and a renewed commitment to Christianity. This maturation is underscored by his relationship with Friday, illustrating themes of colonialism and moral redemption.
How does Robinson Crusoe's character develop?
Defoe is particularly interesting in his tracing of Robinson Crusoe's moral development over his long stay on the island. Crusoe starts out an unbeliever, but as he survives against all the odds on the deserted island he comes to see the hand of providence in his life.
At first, he leaves on his shipboard adventure without telling his parents. He starts off on the wrong foot:
without asking God's Blessing, or my Father's, without any Consideration of Circumstances or Consequences and in an ill Hour, God knows.
His involvement in the shipwreck, by implication, is his punishment for heading out recklessly on his own. In fact, his father had warned him of such consequences.
Once on the island, Crusoe keeps a journal and, being alone, has plenty of time to reflect on what has happened to him and to engage in self-examination and examination of conscience, both important aspects...
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of Protestantism. At first, he blames God for his situation. He expects to die soon and wonders what sense it makes for God to give people life only to make them suffer so:
I had great Reason to consider it as a Determination of Heaven, that in this desolate Place, and in this desolate Manner I should end my life; the Tears would run plentifully down my Face when I made these Reflections, and sometimes I would expostulate with my self, Why Providence should thus completely ruine its Creatures, and render them so absolutely miserable, so without Help abandon'd, so entirely depress'd, that it could hardly be rational to be thankful for such a Life.
Crusoe, however, finds Bibles on the abandoned ship and as he reads one, begins to believe that it was God's plan for his redemption that brought him to this island. Finally, he becomes a complete convert to Christianity and decides that moral redemption from the mental anguish brought on by sin is more important than relief from physical sufferings. His moral regeneration is complete when he decides that forgiveness of sins is more important than being rescued from his island home:
Now I look'd back upon my past Life with such Horrour, and my Sins appear'd so dreadful, that my Soul sought nothing of God, but Deliverance from he Load of Guilt that bore down all my Comfort: As for my solitary Life it was nothing; I did not so much as pray to be deliver'd from it, or think of it; It was all of no Consideration in Comparison to this: And I add this Part here, to hint to whoever shall read it, that whenever they come to a true Sense of things, they will find Deliverance from Sin a much greater Blessing, than Deliverance from Affliction.
Crusoe, having developed into a mature Christian due to his solitude and trials, is able to convert Friday to Christianity. Crusoe's moral change and his development of a relationship with God is a crucial aspect of the novel.
In the book Robinson Crusoe, the character of Crusoe develops through the necessity of his finding ways to survive on the island. He first uses his skills and evident knowledge of some survival techniques to find shelter for himself and security from any possible predators. Crusoe's first night is spent in the trees, and after that, he painstakingly builds a shelter against a high cliff, even carving out more room within it over time. Crusoe next revisits the stranded ship he arrived on and scavenges supplies and parts of the ship after constructing a raft for this purpose. He finishes saving the needed supplies just before the ship is carried off by a storm.
Crusoe wards off what could have been impending insanity by keeping himself busy with finding ways to survive. His character develops further as he fences in and domesticates a goat. His evolving friendship with his found friend, Friday, adds depth to his character as the two learn to communicate and cooperate.
Analyze the character of Robinson Crusoe.
Robinson Crusoe is the eponymous protagonist of a novel by Daniel Defoe initially published on 25 April 1719. The novel is framed as the autobiography of the protagonist and details his experiences as a castaway on a remote island. Its choice of protagonist reflects the popularity of travelers' tales in a great age of exploration when Europeans were encountering what were for them exotic cultures on distant continents.
The narrative follows Crusoe as he struggles to survive after his shipwreck. In the narrative, Crusoe illustrates the values of self-reliance, practical skills, and determination, all of which modeled important masculine virtues for the readers. These are values Defoe praised in his works of nonfiction as well and saw as particularly associated with Dissent. Crusoe is independent, adventurous, intelligent, rational, pious, and has a wide range of practical skills and knowledge.
The author Defoe was what was called a Dissenter, an English Protestant who was not a member of the established Church of England. Dissent tended to be theologically Calvinist and emphasized individual hard work, moral virtue, and personal piety. Religious belief sustains Crusoe on the island.
The encounter with Friday reflects English colonialism as it was enacted in the Caribbean. The relationship is strongly paternalistic. Crusoe's conversion of Friday to Christianity replicates in microcosm the way English missionary activity was seen as "civilizing" native populations.
What is an analysis of Robinson Crusoe?
Much celebrated for its realism and often referred to as the first English novel, Robinson Crusoe has inspired both intense devotion and intense revulsion. Few critics, however, remain neutral about it.
Virginia Woolf, who writes appreciatively of this novel in her second Common Reader, says this of it:
A middle class had come into existence, able to read and anxious to read not only about the loves of princes and princesses, but about themselves and the details of their humdrum lives. Stretched upon a thousand pens, prose had accommodated itself to the demand; it had fitted itself to express the facts of life rather than the poetry.
Woolf's stance has been a common take on the novel: Robinson Crusoe celebrates the thrift, self-reliance, and common sense of a growing middle class which depended on its own wits and resourcefulness to rise in the world rather than on inherited titles or wealth.
In the modern era, however, critics have been prone to critique it. Franz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, attacks its colonialist mindset and suggests Friday should have taken Crusoe's gun and gotten rid of his oppressor. French theorist Gilles Deleuze, in his essay "Desert Islands," notes that property is everything in the novel and "nothing is invented." He decries Friday's happiness at being a slave and states that any "healthy" reader would wish to see Friday eat Crusoe.
While the novel has been critiqued by post-colonialists for its celebration of Eurocentric, protestant, middle-class bourgeois values, it is also much loved as an engaging and realistic story into which one can enter imaginatively, enjoying the many ways Crusoe makes the most of his situation and builds a comfortable life for himself against the odds.
Danie Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is not only a classic adventure tale, one of the first novels of England, but it is also a moral tale of a prodigal son who rejects the Puritan faith and work ethic of his father, engaging in greedy ventures and a slave trading, but in the end turns to these very concepts as his sole means of survival. Especially after he is shipwrecked and keeps a diary, Crusoe finally turns to God and the Bible; thus, Defoe's novel is also a maturation novel as young and ingenuous Robinson sets sail but knows nothing about the sea or the world. But, after his twenty-eight years on a deserted island teach him that "the middle" of which his father urged him in the beginning of the narrative,
...the middle station of life was calculated for all kind of virtues and all kind of enjoyments; that peace and plenty were the handmaids of a middle fortune; that temperance, moderation,...all agreeable diversion, and all desirable pleasures, were the blessings attending the middle station of life; that this way men went silently and smoothly through the world....
When left to his own ingenuity and spiritual devices, Robinson Crusoe returns to these teachings of his father, and is certainly a better man.