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| Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe
Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe
DANIEL DEFOE
ROBINSON CRUSOE
- BIOGRAPHY
- SUMMARY
- INTERPRETATION
- BIOGRAPHY
- ¬
1660, Cripplegate
U 1731, London
– Age of Enlightenment
- 1695 he changed his
name from Foe to Defoe
- 1682 he abandoned his
father’s plan to become a Presbyterian priest and became a merchant in
Cornhill
- 1697-1701 he served as
a secret agent for William III
- 1701 appeared his
satirical poem “The True-Born Englishman”, a bestseller
- 1703 he was arrested
for “The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters”, an ironical satire on
High Church extremism, committed to Newgate and pilloried.
(angeprangert)
- 1703-1714 he served as
a secret agent for Harley and other ministers and produced the
“Review”, a pro-government newspaper
- 1719 “The Life
and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe”
- 1722 “Moll
Flanders”, “A Journal of the Plague Year”
- 1724
“Roxana”
“A prolific and versatile writer he produced some
500 books on a wide variety of topics, including politics, geography, crime,
religion, economics, marriage, psychology and superstition. He delighted
in
role-playing and disguise, a skill he used to great
effect as a secret agent, and in his writing he often adopted a pseudonym or
another personality for rhetorical
impact.”[1]
“Defoe had a great influence on the development of
the English novel and many consider him to be the first true
novelist.”1
- SUMMARY
Robinson Crusoe is the son of a merchant from Bremen,
that settled in York. Love of adventure turns him into a sailor. He makes a
couple of trips to Africa and becomes a wealthy man, and a greedy one, too. On a
trip to Guinea, where he intended to buy cheap slaves, his ship runs aground in
a hurricane. Robinson, the only one who survived the storm, managed to reach the
shore of an island. The next morning he spots his shipwreck. He ships everything
that’s not firmly fixed by raft to the island, among that guns, ammunition
and clothes. He lives a tent, surrounded by a palisade, and stores his supplies
in an adjoining cave. There he starts writing a diary. After a while he believes
that God wants to punish him for his adventurous life and that Gods wants to
show him the perfection of his Creation. The more he adopts the commitments of
the Bible, the more friendly his life on the island gets: He discovers an
orchard, tames goats and grows wheat. One day he discovers an abandoned cannibal
camp. When the cannibals, who live on the mainland, return to the island to cook
one of their victims, Robinson frees the poor guy and names him Friday (the day
of his rescue). He trains him to be a good servant and Christian. Later, both of
them free a Spaniard and Friday’s father. Robinson and Friday sail to the
mainland to warn the Spaniard’s companions. When they return, they prevent
English mutineers to abandon their captain on the island. The Captain gives
Robinson and Friday a ride to England, to show his thankfulness. The mutineers
stay on the island voluntarily and together with the Spaniards they establish an
island state. Robinson Crusoe returned to England after 28 years, two months and
19 days.
- INTERPRETATION
I personally don’t like Robinson. He looks at
everything that surrounds him with the eyes of profit:
"In a word, the nature and experience of things dictated
to me, upon just reflection, that all good things of this world are no farther
good to us than they are for our use; and that whatever we may heap up indeed to
give others, we enjoy just as much as we can use and no more" (p.
140)iv ”He found a capitalist`s paradise, full of things to be
owned, controlled, cultivated, possessed. God`s presence in the novel only
serves to further what Max Weber called "the peculiar ethic" (p. 51) of
Robinson`s capitalism, for it is God who, for better or for worse, instills
within Robinson a sense of economic
duty.”[2] His
"natural" inclinations toward hunting and gathering, gathering and ordering,
ordering and
accumulating are for Robinson God`s preferred way of
dealing with his situation.
”As economics and religion intertwine in Robinson
Crusoe, so does ritual. Robinson`s rituals of survival, maintenance and worship
are described in such meticulous detail in his island-journals that they read
like bank statements. His daily rituals of hunting, tailoring, collecting and
building are Robinson`s business affairs, done in order to maintain and expand
onto his nest.” ii
Like everything else on the island, Friday is an object
to be used, a collectible. His value to Robinson is determined by his obedience
and his potential to be a successful "product" of his master. The ultimate
exercise of Robinson`s power as king is his ability to "tame" Friday and keep
him under his reign. ”He accomplishes this, but Friday`s cultural and
economic transfiguration is different from religious conversion. (...) Robinson
is no missionary traveling from country to country spreading the word about
Christianity. He is a capitalist with no competition and Friday is his trophy,
representing Robinson`s triumph over his situation, over nature, over the
cannibals, over himself.”ii Robinson becomes his own god, and
Friday, "would have worshipped [him] and [his] gun" (p. 214).iv
”Several modern writers, like James Joyce, Toni
Morrison, Derek Walcott and Edward Said, have criticized Defoe`s Robinson Crusoe
for being a allegory of Western (British) colonialism or imperialism, and thus
for advocating to its reading public the suppression of other
cultures.”[3]
Sonja Keerl, LK English, K13, Punkte:
14
1
http://www.futurenet.co.uk/Penguin/Authors/1653.html
[2]
http://miavx1.acs.muohio.edu/~voelbd/
[3]
http://dewey.rug.ac.be/NewFriday/NewStructureFriday/col.html
iv
gopher://eng.hss.cmu.edu/00ftp:English.Server:18th-Century:Defoe-Robinson Crusoe
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