Would the simple category of ‘travel and adventure’
adequately describe Robinson Crusoe?
What distinguish Robinson Crusoe from mere travel and adventure
stories are coherence, the informing spirit, the ideological contents and
thematic meanings. Paul Hunter has praised this novel for all these elements.
As far as the theme of the novel is concerned, it has many thematic meanings.
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is not simply
a story of travel and adventure but it is a story of autobiographical
significance, a moral treatise, a framework of religious significance and
economic doctrine under the surface of travel and adventure. Thus the novel can
be read on many levels. Besides treating the novel as a story of travel and
adventure, we probe it deeper in order to grasp and appreciate its various
meaning.
Religious significance in the novel:
Robinson Crusoe is a religious allegory. It is wrong to say as
Virginia Woolf says God does not exist in Robinson Crusoe. As Milton is
in every line of Paradise lost, God exists in almost every page of Robinson
Crusoe. Inwardly, it is a spiritual voyage. It is like The Pilgrim’s Progress
of John Bunyan. As Bunyan in his novel moves towards the ‘House Beautiful’, Defoe in his novel moves towards the shrine of the island where he explores
God and his divine soul. In Robinson Crusoe, life has been treated as a voyage
of human soul. Just as in The Pilgrim’s Progress, a pilgrim who is the
human soul makes his spiritual progress towards the ‘House Beautiful’, so also like
The pilgrim’s Progress in
Robinson Crusoe Robinson makes his voyage on the sea ‘The Bhavsagar’ which brings him towards
destination, the spiritual salvation when Robinson finds himself repenting on a
solitary island on account of being frightened by the foot- print of man and
again the dream in which a man descends from the cloud to kill him with a spear
and also by the cannibals who
eat human flesh, he realizes his sin of
disobedient which he has committed not for his father but for God. And then he
prays to God to allow him to repent. He finds his penitential tears, which he
shades, have been accepted by God when he finds all the daily necessaries even
the company of a humour being Friday which he longed, he enjoys the mercies of
God which he has not desired and expected. He reconciles himself to the
affections bestowed upon him by God and thanks God for showering blessing on
him. He, like the Bishop of Canterbury in Eliot’s Murder in the
Cathedral mixes his will to the Will of God. He gets reconciled to God. His
soul is saved and he has received the spiritual salvation which he sought for.
Economical Significance in the novel:
Crusoe’s predicament, related to Bourgeois individualism:
Besides religious significance, we can go on to
affirm that the novel Robinson Crusoe
certainly has an economic Import. Karlmarx in his book Das Kapital used this story to illustrate economic theory in
action. According to Karl Marx, the
protagonist in this novel proves himself to be a potential capitalist. But it
is the critic Ian Wyatt who offers a most estimulating and illuminating
interpretation of this novel from the economic point of view. 