Robinson Crusoe

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Robinson Crusoe was middle class from the town of York in the seventeenth century, he is the youngest son out of three of a German merchant. His father encouraged him to study law, however he had a desire to go to sea. His family was strongly against his wish to go to sea, and his father explained that it is better to look for a more modest and safe life for oneself.

Crusoe's place as the rebellious younger son in the family, resembling the Reckless Son in the Bible, enhances the Puritan side of Crusoe's story.

When Crusoe arrives on the island after the shipwreck, he realizes his situation is but a fulfillment of his father's prediction that if Crusoe disregarded his advice, Crusoe would find himself alone with no source of help. Alone on the island, Crusoe finds himself alienated from the outside world due to his sin. It is then that he questions himself “ before I lay down I did what I never had done in all my life I kneeled down and prayed to God to fulfil the promise to me that if I called upon him in the day of trouble he would deliver” (Defoe, 72).

Crusoe is such an interesting character partly because he is so deeply flawed. We’re to understand that his original sin was a boundless curiosity about the world. Sea travel was dangerous in the era and the novel exploits that danger. Crusoe’s willfulness and curiosity lead him, quite literally, to his downfall.

Crusoe speaks openly and closely, with none of the lavish rhetorical effects renowned in earlier ages of English literary history.

The profit Crusoe makes from his first business project, and in acknowledging his inner struggle about obeying with his father or following his desire to go to sea. Crusoe's narrative is not just an adventure story about storms and...

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.... He no longer views himself, as he does in his first journal ingress, as miserable and poor man but is now feeling the friendliness of calling himself king and lord of an ambrosial vale. Crusoe triumphed over the state of nature correlating with the growing of the scientific revolution in that era.

Being stranded on the island gave Robinson Crusoe a renewed spiritual connection to God and his faith and he had to out his faith in the hands of God. He realizes that money was no longer of great importance to him. The highest aspect in this story is how a man how to survive on his own. In this case Defoe succeeds to inform this matter of survival on ones own and how one becomes a different improved person form the unexpected events that throws at you.

Works Cited

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Ed. Evan R. Davis. Peterborough: Broadview, 2010. Print.

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