Do you consider Robinson
Crusoe a fable? Give reasons for your answer.
Answer:
The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York,
Mariner, Written by Himself, as Daniel Defoe
entitled his novel, is read as eagerly today as it was when it was first
published. An exotic novel of travel and adventure, Robinson Crusoe
functions primarily as Defoe’s defense of his bourgeois Protestantism. Crusoe’s
adventures—the shipwrecks, his life as a planter in South America, and his
years of isolation on the island—provide an apt context for his polemic. A
political dissenter and pamphleteer, Defoe saw as his enemies the Tory
aristocrats whose royalism in government and religion blocked the aspirations
of the middle class. Like Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Defoe in this novel
presents a religiously and politically corrupt England. Both authors were
intent on bringing about a moral revolution, and each uses his hero as an
exemplum. Gulliver, however, represents a moral failure, whereas Crusoe’s
adventures reveal his spiritual conversion, a return to the ethics and religion
of his father. As one critic has said of Robinson Crusoe, “We
read it . . . to follow with meticulous interest and constant
self-identification the hero’s success in building up, step by step, out of
whatever material came to hand, a physical and moral replica of the world he
had left behind him.” If Robinson Crusoe is an adventure story, it is also a
moral tale, a commercial accounting and a Puritan fable.
Significantly, Crusoe’s origins are in northern England, in York, where he was born in the early part of the seventeenth century and where his father had made a fortune in trade. He belongs to the solid middle class, the class that was gaining political power during the early eighteenth century, when Defoe published his book.
