Robinson Crusoe: Courageous Or Fable

Strong. Worldly. Determined. Courageous. ,These can be used to describe men in history books and fables, men who laid siege to cities and conquered nations. Those are words that illustrate heroes, protectors of liberty and voyagers who were in search of countless riches and great treasures. Robinson Crusoe was none of these. Robinson Crusoe was a husband, a father, a farmer, but above all, in his eyes, an explorer. He did not scour the world in search of gold and valuable spices, as did many of his counterparts, he took to the high seas simply because “normal” life did not suit him well. The book “The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” takes place in the 18th century, a time when pirates and swashbucklers ran amok and setting off an

Robinson Crusoe was in between trips and struggling to cope with land-based life. His readjusting seemed to be going fine, on the outside at least. His first adventures abroad were a time of soul-searching, if you will. Although separated from his island, Crusoe was done longing for another excursion and was ready to continue on with his life. He bought a country home and hit the ground running, he had all of his time consumed with being an everyman. Working on his farm, managing his servants, and being a family man to his wife and children. was leading a relatively normal life. The vast amount of time abroad seemed to satisfy his longing and his coming back to civilization became an open wound for him. One that started as daydreaming, and turned to a constant obsession, one that started to eat away at his social life and “which hung about me like a chronic distemper”. After a heated emotional episode with his wife, she decided that she did not want to be any further hindrance to his insatiable desire to return to his previous life of exploration and

He time to take in the city as he waited for his nephew, captain of a ship, to set sail. As he solemnly observed the city, Crusoe came to see that the London, or any other city for that matter, was meant for him. The lifestyle was not something that was foreign to him at all, it was that during him years abroad he had grown accustomed to another life, another set of rules. He had become used to a more primitive sense of living, not one based in the intricacies of crooked politics, but one of raw human emotion and survival of the fittest. Crusoe recognized the time as an opportunity to turn over a new leaf and start writing a new chapter of his life. At the time, London was rebuilding itself, as it had been the site of a disastrous firestorm that burned a large portion of the city to the ground. Though the city had been dealt a great deal of loss, both human and financial, London had been in the process of revamping itself through a tiresome rebuilding process. It seems only fitting that Crusoe comes to the city during that time, as the both of them are very delicate in their states of rediscovery and