LBST 302: Lecture on Robinson Crusoe
March 28, 1996

[The following is the text of a lecture delivered, in part, in LBST 302 in 
March 1996]
Copyright Ian Johnston, Malaspina University-College, 1996

A.  Introduction

Today we are considering yet another story about an adventurer who ends up on an island 
for many years and then returns back home.  We have already considered two other such 
stories, The Odyssey and The Tempest, and we are going on next week to read another, 
Gulliver’s Travels.  These four stories have another point in common: they are all 
unusually popular.  There is something very appealing to the popular imagination about 
such narratives, and we don’t have to be Liberal Studies students to recognize that.

Today, I'd like to suggest what these stories have in common and, in the process, to offer 
some reasons why this narrative form is so appealing.  And then I’d like to apply some of 
those observations to this novel.  My major purpose here, which will become apparent in a 
few moments, is to explore the vision of life (or at least some aspects of it) which this 
novel holds out to us and which is significantly different from the others, no matter how 
apparently similar the narrative form might be.

B.  The Attractions of the Isolato Adventurer

Very simply put, these four stories have a similar general narrative structure which goes 
something like this: (a) a member of a sophisticated European society is accidentally cast 
adrift into the wilderness, where everything is unfamiliar and there are no apparent aids of 
normal society; (b) the hero must adjust to this strange environment, find some means of 
coping with the physical and the psychological dislocation; (c) the hero must find a way 
off the island, and (d) the hero must reintegrate himself into the society from which he 
unwillingly was alienated.  

The casting adrift can happen in any number of ways.  Typically it is the result of a 
shipwreck, a mutiny, or a misadventure of some kind.  Adapting to the new environment 
may or may not involve adjusting to the people who live there.  It almost always will 
require the hero to cope with a very different vision of nature, and he will be forced to 
confront the fact that in this place things run very differently from what he is used to.  
This, in turn, may produce all sorts of reflections or changes in the normal routine of the 
hero.

This reintegration may reveal a number of things, for example, his vision of society which 
he arrived on the island with has been confirmed in some way (e.g., perhaps Odysseus), so 
that he has discovered the value of customary civilization in a new way, or alternatively he 
has significantly changed in some way and is now prepared to enter society with a more 
mature attitude towards what is really important in life (e.g., Prospero), or perhaps he has 
great difficulty now accepting the society he left because he has for better or worse 
fundamentally altered his understanding of what really matters and is now, to a greater or 
lesser extent, a stranger in his own land (e.g., the person returning from the cave or 
Gulliver, who has developed a strong critical sense to things which before the experience 
he endorsed unreflectingly).  In some cases he may be so transformed in the wilderness 
that he does not want to return (e.g., Gulliver) and remains permanently estranged from 
the society he left or else has to be dragged protesting back to civilization.

One major source of interest in such stories, naturally, is the way in which the hero copes 
with the very different physical  world in which he finds himself.  He brings to the island 
certain attitudes, certain perceptions, certain skills—things we are familiar with—all of 
which have enabled him to cope more or less successfully in the civilized world.  These, 
together with his character, are now exposed and tested as never before, for he has no 
habitual group to keep him in constant touch with the communal resources and values 
which have hitherto been an important, if unacknowledged, aid, and he is, in all elements 
of daily living, thrown onto his own resources as an individual having to live without the 
customary social support.

This situation arouses interest on a number of levels.  The first one is, quite simply, the 
pleasure we take in the mechanical details of coping in a strange place without the 
customary assistance we are used to.  In a wilderness or in a magic island or in a land of 
pygmies or giants, how does one cope with the everyday realities of life: food, shelter, 
going to the toilet, keeping warm, interacting with other forms of life on the island, 
whether they are wild animals like snakes and goats or wild people like Polyphemus and 
Caliban or tempting creatures like Calypso and Ariel, how do we arrange things in their 
particularity?  We take a natural delight in exploring the everyday problems of different 
worlds, especially seen, as these stories present them, in direct juxtaposition with our own.

But there’s a deeper interest, too.  For such a story, if the characterization and the 
depiction of detail are at all well done, inevitably brings to the surface conflicts of value.  
The hero has to make unusual choices which would not be presented to him in such a 
stark fashion, if at all, back home.  For he is free in a way that none of us is in traditional 
society, and he faces unusual challenges.  He has to decide how to deal with the situation, 
how to spend his time, how to organize an unexpected set of possibilities.  In other words, 
the isolato has to discover who he is,  He may be quite certain of that when he arrives, but 
his conception of what matters in life—his moral system—is going to come under pressure 
as never before.  And the process of making these decisions will often (perhaps inevitably) 
educate him about what really matters and what does not.

Thus, adventures with isolatos are, or can easily become, an exploration of moral values 
forced into the awareness of the hero by an unusual circumstance.  And this development 
brings with it inevitably a criticism or a confirmation of the social values (or some of them) 
of the society of which he is a representative, whose values he brings with him to the 
island, and to which he returns.  Prospero’s rejection of the island and of the magic he so 
loves, like Odysseus’ rejection of Calypso for his own Penelope, is not just a manifestation 
of the hero’s moral nature; it is also a confirmation of certain values in the society to 
which they are returning.  Gulliver’s rejection of European society upon his return at the 
end of the fourth voyage is, in large part, a very severe criticism of the moral laxity of 
Europe.

C.  Robinson Crusoe: Some General Observations

If we look at Robinson Crusoe in this so far rather general light, we can begin to shape an 
interpretation.  I’m going to return to some of these points in more detail later, but let me 
just sketch out the shape of how one might interpret this book.

Up to his arrival on the island, Robinson Crusoe is a fairly typical adventurous young lad, 
who has not much time for the sober advice of his father that he should enter the middle 
class and settle down to the safe and secure calling of making money.  He runs off to sea 
and has a few adventures and gets shipwrecked.  Nothing in his life up to this point 
suggests that he is in any way extraordinary, physically, intellectually, socially, or in any 
other way.  That, of course, is an important difference between this narrative and the ones 
we have read so far, in which the hero is, from the start a superior and mature person (a 
moral and social aristocrat).  Robinson Crusoe is, in a very real sense, an everyman, a 
typical middle-class representative of European society, rather than a singularly gifted 
individual, a social and mental aristocrat.  In fact, one of the most important aspects of this 
book is that it is celebrating a new hero—the middle class worker.

He arrives on an island that is uninhabited (that is another major difference between his 
story and the others I have mentioned, and it’s very significant, as I shall mention later).  It 
is not a particularly cruel wilderness; he does not have to fight to survive.  In fact, in many 
ways the place seems something of a paradise, in which Robinson Crusoe is more or less 
free to do whatever he wants without interruption from a very hostile climate or any other 
people.  The island, indeed, offers him a great deal of immediate help (goats, fish, raisins, 
convenient shelter, and so on).

Given that, the single most important fact of the story is that in this situation Robinson 
Crusoe chooses to channel all of his efforts into a single activity, manual labour.  Most of 
the book is about work, the day-by-day routine and mundane tasks that Robinson Crusoe 
carries out, everything from making clothes, to sowing seeds or drying raisins, to building 
a house and a country bower and a boat, and so on.  If we look at what this book actually 
spends most of its time dealing with (especially in comparison with the Odyssey and the 
Tempest) we can say that whatever values it is celebrating, they are centrally concerned 
with these activities.  

In discussing this point (as I shall later) it is important to notice all the possible things that 
are left out.  There are many, many things about the island and about Robinson Crusoe’s 
life there that we learn nothing about.  If we assume, as we must, that the details in the 
book are the things that Robinson Crusoe and Defoe thought were essential for us to 
understand and that the details that are left out are peripheral, then we begin to get a sense 
of the particular vision of life this book calls our attention to.

Robinson Crusoe does come into contact with others eventually, with some cannibals, 
Friday, and some Europeans.  By this time he has been on the island for many years and 
has matured from the callow youth who arrived.  The way in which he deals with them 
reveals his mature judgement about what is important and what is not.  So, for example, 
the way in which he instantly relegates Friday to the role of the servant and keeps him in 
that role, even after he leaves the island, is an endorsement of a particular attitude to a 
human relationship as valuable and sanctioned.

When Robinson Crusoe returns from the island back to civilization, it’s as if he has never 
been away.  He has no trouble adjusting.  And he has gained an important new concern 
with money—something that his father urged him to take seriously as a young man, advice 
which Robinson Crusoe ignored.  Now, many years later, he is most immediately 
concerned, not to think about his adventures or to reflect on what living in the wilderness 
might reveal about the limitations of European society or the nature of human beings, or 
about the mysteries of life, but rather to bring his accounts up to date, reckoning his 
accumulated capital, disbursing his money judiciously to those who have served him 
honestly as stewards of his investments, and at times congratulating himself for his success 
as a confirmation of a certain religious view of life.

If we look at just these general points, without yet going into particular details, I think it 
becomes clear that the story of this isolato is, in a very obvious sense, a morality story 
about a wayward but typical youth of no particular talent whose life turned out all right in 
the end because he discovered the importance of the values which really matter.  And what 
are those values?  In a nutshell, they are those associated with the Protestant Work Ethic, 
those virtues, which I spoke of earlier in the lecture on Hobbes, which arise out of the 
Puritan’s sense of the religious life as a total commitment to a calling, unremitting service 
in what generally appears as a very restricted but often challenging commitment.  By way 
of exploring that further, I’d like to turn now to examine how this book endorses that 
work ethic.  Then, if there’s time, I’d like to consider how that work ethic is seen 

throughout in a religious context.

D.  The Work Ethic

I have made the claim above that the central concern of Robinson Crusoe’s experiences on 
the island is work.  The great majority of the text is taken up with describing his unceasing 
efforts at mundane tasks.  Robinson Crusoe is clearly eager to persuade his readers that he 
was never idle.  Many of his undertakings may have been futile (like his first big boat, 
which he could not move to the water), but they kept him busy.  We might wonder to 
what extent he needs to do all the things he describes for us, like, for example, making 
bread or living off the produce he creates through his own agriculture.  Is there no natural 
sustenance on the island which might be obtained with less labour?  What about fishing?  
Wouldn’t that be easier?  He tries it and has success, but he doesn’t stay with it.  Why 
not?  Surely, given the topical nature of the island, he doesn’t have to labour so much?  

Questions like this miss the point.  The book is a tribute to work, and the overwhelming 
message I get from it goes something like this: God has put us on this world to work.  
That, in effect, means directing our energies to transform the world around us, to shape it 
to our will, to our calling, on a day-by-day basis.  The important thing about all of 
Robinson Crusoe’s agricultural efforts is not that he must have that particular food, but 
that he has willed himself into becoming a farmer.  Having done that, having accepted that 
as his calling, no challenge can be too great to achieve it.  And his success at making bread 
and all the other minor victories are a tribute to his resolution, to his surviving the test of 
the island.  Agriculture is the perfect calling, of course, because it’s so time consuming 
and thus a daily proof of one’s perseverance.  Fishing or hunting, by contrast, demand far 
less time in mundane activities.  Of course, he didn’t rely much on fishing, as he might 
have, because it’s too easy, too sedentary, too meditative an occupation.

That’s why some things matter, while others don’t.  The really important things in 
Robinson Crusoe are those that help him in his calling, especially the most valuable things 
he removes from the boat, the tools and the guns.  Of course, he takes out some Bibles 
and clothes and liquor and materials.  But these are far less important that the machines 
necessary for him to impose his will on nature.  He makes no experiments with different 
forms of living or even with very different forms of food.  He is not interested, because his 
task, as he sees it, is to impose his will on the island.  And the book is a tribute to the 
unremitting effort one man makes to achieve that end.

In this endeavour, it’s really important to keep the accounts—especially to keep track of 
time, the expenditure of your resources, and the return on your investment. Only if you do 
that can you be sure that your work is being productive, is producing a surplus, the sure 
sign that you are on the right track.  So Robinson Crusoe keeps a journal, keeps notches 
in the tree to know the date (time is money), and is always producing a reckoning of 
everything (even of the people killed in various encounters).  Readers sometimes wonder 
why Robinson Crusoe tells us what he did and then tells us again in the journal.  Well, one 
possibility is that the technique indicates to us that he is learning the importance of 
keeping a written reckoning—the very fact that he has started a journal is an indication of 
his growing virtue.  

When he enters into arrangements with people, he likes to set up a contract, in which all 
conditions, especially the financial obligations are clearly stipulated (e.g., when he makes 
his agreement with the captain to recover the ship, the important clause is not that, if 
successful, the captain will take him back to England but that he will take them “passage 
free.”  What could be a higher sign of his success than his ability to obtain such a financial 
perquisite?).

We don’t find in this book that Robinson Crusoe in all those years spends much time 
reading the Bible (he says he does, but from the attention paid to it, it’s clearly far less 
important than work); from time to time we are told he thinks about things, but his 
thoughts are generally repetitive reformulations of a very simple belief in Divine 
Providence.  His thoughts on higher things, in fact, are far less interesting than his 
immediately practical plans about how to build something or carry out an immediate task.  
There’s not a touch of the philosopher or the mystic about him; he is a thoroughly 
practical imagination.

Robinson Crusoe is a keen observer, but only of those things which he needs to know 
about in order to carry out a practical project.  He can observe the flow of the sea and 
make important practical conclusions about navigation in a small boat.  Furthermore, he 
has a good empirical sense.  He knows how to conduct an experiment in sowing a crop 
(saving some of the seed for a second attempt); he has the ability to learn from his failures 
(like building the boat too far from the water).  Above all he has enormous self-discipline.  
No matter how boring and time-consuming the task, he will carry it out.  But he lacks 
totally the capacity for wonder, a simple contemplative joy at the beauty and variety of the 
world, that quality which is a marked feature of Odysseus’s imagination and of Miranda’s, 
or for that matter any intense desire to enquire into things more abstract than the 
immediate job at hand.  

For example, we never learn about the effects on him of a tropical sunrise or sunset over 
the sea or about the mystery of the sea or the magic wonder of the island or of the 
ambiguous complexities of feelings as he gazes at the stars.  He is rarely, if ever, troubled 
by an unexpected thought.  His ruminations on the cannibals begin to touch on some 
potentially very interesting issues to do with cultural relativism and a critical attitude to 
received opinion and even to Christian doctrine, but these do not lead him anywhere.  He 
decides that it is best to leave them alone, degraded specimens of humanity as they are, for 
God to deal with.  Cannibals, like everything else, exists as a challenge to overcome—not 
with wit and inventiveness, but with caution, prudence, toil, and gunpowder.  If they are 
not an immediate problem, because they fall outside one’s project, then it is best to ignore 
them completely.

The ultimate reward of this view of life is that one acquires the right to the ultimate goal 
of middle class Protestant striving, the right to call oneself the owner of a piece of 
property.  What confers ownership is not heredity or one’s aristocratic share of the goods 
of this life; the only thing that truly confers the right to call yourself an owner is work.  
That’s why Robinson Crusoe can call himself after a number of years the Governor of the 
island.  At first this seems as if it might be a self-deprecating jest.  But it is nothing of the 
sort.  He is the lord of the island, not because he is the first person there, but because he 
has earned the title through the work he has done, through transforming a hitherto idle and 
therefore useless piece of land into a productive and profitable business venture, a small 
farm.

We learn very little in the novel about how Robinson Crusoe feels about himself, deep 
inside where it really counts.  Interestingly enough, the most revealing glimpses into his 
thought processes come when he reflects on his accomplishments.

I descended a little on the side of that delicious vale, surveying it with a secret kind 
of pleasure (though mixed with my other afflicting thoughts), to think that this was 
all my own, that I was king and lord of all this country indefeasibly and had a right 
of possession; and if I could convey it, I might have it in inheritance, as completely 
as any lord of a manor in England.  (101)

The language of this quotation is interesting.  He admits he takes pleasure in his 
accomplishment, but there’s a sense of guilt in the admission (he has to remind us that he 
also has afflictions).  And he frames his feelings of satisfaction entirely in legal terms 
(“indefeasibly,” “right of possession,” “convey”).  What stimulates his satisfaction is not 
the accomplishment or the beauty or the sense of his own proven skill, but the sense of 
legal ownership.  He has gone from a castaway to the equivalent of an aristocrat.

Later on he has a similar reflection:

My island was now peopled, and I thought myself very rich in subjects; and it was 
a merry reflection, which I frequently made, how like a king I looked.  First of all, 
the whole country was my own mere property, so that I had an undoubted right of 
dominion.  Secondly, my people were perfectly subjected.  I was absolute lord and 
lawgiver; they all owed their lives to me, and were ready to lay down their lives, if 
there had been occasion for it, for me.  It was remarkable, too, we had but three 
subjects, and they were of three different religions.  My man Friday was a 
Protestant, his father was a pagan and a cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist.  
However, I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominion.  (236)

There is clearly an echo of Hobbes here.  The religious differences or the common 
Christian bonding represented in this tiny community is irrelevant.  What matters is the 
structure of obligation established by agreement and by the law concerning property.  
Robinson Crusoe is not the sovereign through any inherent merit in himself, but because 
he has staked his ownership to the land through work and because the others have 
covenanted to obey him.

Here Defoe is echoing what was fast becoming a central claim in the attitude of the 
Protestant pioneers in the New World, a concept articulated by John Locke, among others 
(an attitude which was fundamental to the development of Canada and which is still at 
work in shaping some of our attitudes to the native people: 

He that in Obedience to this command of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part 
of [the Earth] thereby annexed to him something that was his Property, which 
another has no title to, nor could without injury take from him. . . .  God gave the 
World to Men in Common; but since He gave to them for their benefit . . . it 
cannot be supposed He meant it should always remain Common and uncultivated.  
He gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rationed (and Labor was to be his 
Title to it) not to the Fancy and Covetousness of the Quarrelsome and 
Contentious. . . .  There cannot be a clearer demonstration of any thing, that 
several Nations of the Americas are of this, who are rich in Lands, and poor in all 
the comforts of life; whom Nature having furnished as liberally as any other 
People, either the materials of Plenty . . . yet for want of improving it by labor, 
have not one hundredth part of the Conveniences we enjoy; and a King there feeds, 
lodges, and is clad worse than a day Laborer in England.  (Locke, Two Treatises of 
Government)

His lordship over the land and ultimately over other human beings who arrive there does 
not come from any comparative excellence of station over them.  Nor does he ever seek to 
claim the territory, as a Frenchman or Spaniard might, in the name of his country or his 
monarch or his church.  Robinson Crusoe is such an individual that he has no 
consciousness of representing England or striving to maintain or extend an English way of 
life.  Life is much too personal a responsibility and challenge to think of oneself as part of 
a collective.  So he becomes in his own eyes the lord of the place and the others are his 
subordinates because he has worked and they have not.  That is the single most important 
value demonstrated by Robinson Crusoe and for him the greatest single confirmation of 
his successful life.

This attitude manifests itself even in the diversions and amusements he tells us about, since 
the most important of those appear to be his ability to tame nature (the dog and the 
parrot) to his will (178).  After all, what could be a more apt symbol of a relationship with 
nature which sees it as something to be subdued to one’s will than a parrot which gives 
back only the words and the voice of the individual.  The truth of nature thus becomes a 
series of self-reflecting Polly syllables and the only voice he hears for years is the self-
regarding “Polly loves her cracker.”

Robinson Crusoe, although good humoured enough, totally lacks any sense of humour 
which might lead him to see any incongruity in his situation or any irony in his 
understanding of things.  There is in this book no sense of irony, that life might, in fact, be 
complicated and require some intellectual or emotional exploration.  There is very little, if 
any, joy in life, certainly nothing to match the satisfaction which comes from looking at 
your account book and being able to prove that you have reaped a reward on your 
investment and work.  When we learn right at the end that Robinson Crusoe has married, 
the way he states the matter, the important point is that the marriage was to his advantage 
and produced a profit (that’s much more important than the woman’s identity or their 
common happiness together).

Robinson Crusoe develops no critical sense at all, in spite of being in a situation where one 
would think such an attitude would be hard to avoid.  He comes close at times, for 
example, in his descriptions of the money he has recovered from the Spanish shipwreck.  
On the island it is useless and over time it corrodes.  That phenomenon might, in a more 
reflective mind (like Gulliver’s), lead one to speculate on the European obsession with 
money, whose value derives from the social conventions we have associated with it, 
conventions which are exposed as artificial and hollow by the island experience.  But 
Robinson Crusoe shows little evidence of developing any such awareness.  In fact, once he 
returns to Europe the experience on the island seems to confirm in his mind the 
importance of money as a sign of spiritual success in realizing the good life.

This sense that Robinson Crusoe’s attitude to the island life as his calling may explain why 
there is so little emphasis in this book that Robinson Crusoe thinks his life is somehow 
wasted on the island and why so little attention paid to thoughts of escape or a longing for 
escape.  God has placed him on the island to prove himself, to show that he can meet the 
world with the right stuff, the persevering will and the diligent application of his toil, aided 
by technology, in a foreign situation, without the need for anyone else.  To complain about 
it, to long for something different, is a sign that one lacks faith.

Here, it’s important to note that the island is uninhabited.  For the real business of life 
represented in this book is essentially a radically individualistic ethic.  Whereas Odysseus is 
always motivated by social concerns—his desire for hospitality, fame, status, and home 
(things which one can only achieve by risking encounters with other people)—and 
whereas Prospero is motivated by social bonding, especially with his daughter—Robinson 
Crusoe’s major concern is always with himself, with his own responsibilities to prove 
himself in isolation from his fellow human beings.  He doesn’t, in fact, meet any fellow 
human beings until he has proved himself, and then he simply fits them into his vision of 
himself as a fully realized isolated individual.  They matter because they can assist him 
with his economic projects, not because he needs their society.  This is a vision of life 
about as far removed from Aristotle’s notion that human beings are by nature social and 
political animals as one can get.

Robinson Crusoe’s relationships with people are based on no traditional social bonds or 
moral obligations.  They are based on business relationships—on who owes what to 
whom.  If you have rescued someone, then that gives them in your debt, and you are, in 
effect, their governor.  The most valuable people in the world are those who most honestly 
discharge their financial obligations to you.  Those to whom you have no such obligations, 
like your servant, for example, you can more or less deal with as you wish, even selling 
them into slavery, provided you make a profit, or you can simply ignore them as irrelevant 
to your life (like Friday’s father).  We get a very touching picture of how much Friday 
loves his father, but the value of that relationship has no effect on Robinson Crusoe’s 
actions, and the father just disappears from the book, while Friday remains an important 
servant.  Gone from this book are those things central to the world of the Tempest, the 
idea that social bonding, with its complex system of obligations, responsibilities, and 
obedience, is the essential feature of communal living and of life itself.

Crusoe’s admiration for Friday does not educate him into any sense that his vision of life 
might be too narrow.  He genuinely admires Friday for the way in which Friday can work 
and can willingly accept a subordinate position in their joint work together.  He’s simply 
not interested in what Friday might have to teach him about aboriginal customs, about 
things outside Robinson Crusoe’s value system, about Friday’s full character  In that 
sense, Robinson Crusoe has no intellectual or emotional concern for others at all.  Friday 
is interesting only to the extent that he is useful, and he is useful only to the extent that he 
can fit in with Robinson Crusoe’s projects and become, in effect, one more tool he can use 
in his calling.  Since Friday does that so well, Robinson Crusoe thinks he’s a fine 
specimen, “My man Friday.”

Robinson Crusoe is very proud of what he does when he revisits the island.  But what he 
does is simply put it on a more viable capitalist footing, furthering the imposition on the 
island of his own European Protestant values.  If the work is organized properly in that 
fashion, then one doesn’t have to worry about the quality of the community one has 
created or about what might happen to nature or to any of those non-agricultural types, 
like cannibals, who use the island for other purposes.  The fact that the people on the 
island are producing a surplus, are making a profit, is sufficient reason to congratulate 
oneself that one is doing the right thing.  The sense that one gets out of this is that there 
are no concessions made at all to the fact that this island is not Europe.  That doesn’t 
matter.  European life is simply imposed on the place without a qualm.

In fact, the transformation of the island from the “Island of Despair” (the name Robinson 
Crusoe first gives it) into a thriving European colony, an extension of the European life, 
and the great satisfaction Robinson Crusoe takes from that transformation indicate that 
this is a success story, above all a tribute to the enormous value of individual effort in 
carrying out years and years of dreary work, of perseverance, of faith, and a of a total 
commitment to a very narrow endeavour.

When he revisits the island he brings valuable presents: tools and weapons.  And he leaves 
behind a carpenter and a smith.  Even though he has no intention of living there, he is still 
determined to maintain that the island is his property

E.  The Religious Dimension

This view of life is given a religious dimension in the text.  Robinson Crusoe’s discovery 
of the work ethic goes hand in hand with a spiritual awakening.  I don’t think anyone 
would argue that Robinson Crusoe is a very profound religious thinker, although religion 
is part of his education and transformation.  He claims he reads the Bible, and he is 
prepared to quote it from time to time.  But he doesn’t puzzle over it or even get involved 
in the narrative or character attractions of the stories.  The Bible for him appears to be 
something like a Dale Carnegie handbook of maxims to keep the work on schedule and to 
stifle any possible complaints or longings for a different situation.  Still, the religious 
dimension is central to what this book is about.

Robinson Crusoe’s interpretation of his life links the financial success directly and 
repeatedly with his growth in religious awareness.  This is not an intellectual conversion 
but, simply put, an awareness that he has, in some ways, received God’s grace and is 
under His care.  The growing profitability of his efforts is proof of such a spiritual reward.  
This awareness fills him with a sense of guilt for his former life and a great desire to be 
relieved of that guilt.  The desire to be relieved from that feeling of guilt, in fact, is much 
stronger than Robinson Crusoe’s desire to be delivered from the island.

Now I looked back upon my past life with such horror, and my sins appeared so 
dreadful, that my soul sought nothing of God but deliverance from the load of guilt 
that bore down all my comfort.  As for my solitary life; it was nothing; I did not so 
much as pray to be delivered from it or think of it; it was all of no considerations in 
comparison to this; and I added this part here to hint to whoever shall read it, that 
whenever they come to a true sense of things, they will find deliverance from sin a 
much greater blessing than deliverance from affliction.  (98)

Like a true Puritan, here Robinson Crusoe acknowledges that for him the real drama of 
life, the stuff that really matters, is internal.  Internal guilt is so much more central to life 
than external affliction.  Thus, complaining about affliction misses the point.  The task is to 
earn the grace of God which will ease the guilt.  In such a spiritual drama, one’s 
geographical location is a minor point.  So whereas for Odysseus and Prospero, the 
absence of their home civilization is something they really care about and want to take 
care of, Robinson Crusoe’s absence from home is, in a very real way, irrelevant to what 
life is all about.  If the central metaphor of life is the spiritual relationship between oneself 
and God, in comparison with which all social bonds are basically irrelevant, then we are on 
islands.  So what does it really matter if I find myself on a real island.  The priorities are 
life remain the same.

That’s why the central image of this book for me is Robinson Crusoe’s home on the 
island, that amazing fortress built on an island where there is nothing to threaten him.  He 
puts more effort into the complex defence works to keep himself and his goods, especially 
his tools, safe.  In the same way, he lives his life to protect that inner fortress of his soul.  
Working constantly keeps unruly thoughts and despair from invading his inner home.  
Anything that might threaten that inner fortress, like too much meditation on anything, 
even on the nature of God, or reading or wonder or whatever is to be kept away as an 
interference and a threat.  Any questioning of the arrangements is a potential slackening of 
the faith which leads to sin:

From hence I sometimes was led too far to invade the sovereignty of Providence 
and, as it were, arraign the justice of so arbitrary a disposition of things that should 
hide that light from some and reveal to others, and yet expect like duty from both.  
But I shut it up and checked my thoughts with this conclusion, first, that we did 
not know as God was necessarily, and by the nature of His being, infinitely holy 
and just, so it could not be but that if these creatures were all sentenced to absence 
from Himself, it was on account of sinning against that alight which, as the 
Scripture says, was a law to themselves, and by such rules as their consciences 
would acknowledge to be just, though the foundation was not discovered to us.  
And secondly, that still, as we are all the clay in the hands of the Potter, no vessel 
could say to Him, “Why hast Thou formed me thus?”  (207)

Thus, ignorance about many things is a condition of life, even at times an advantage, since 
it conceals from us many things we might otherwise fear and which might distract us from 
the task at hand (see p. 192).  The occasional visit from the cannibals may present a 
remote physical threat, but the presence of the Devil, who brings fear and despair, is much 
more serious, especially since it renders Robinson Crusoe less capable of working properly 
as he should.

Thus, in a sense, Robinson Crusoe is deep in his spirit an isolato, a man living his life as a 
solitary spiritual pilgrimage, even after he returns from Europe.  The only real effort he 
makes with anyone is his attempt to teach Friday the rudiments of Christianity.  But the 
motivation behind this is clearly not because Crusoe feels an urge to spread the gospel (he 
thinks the cannibals should be ignored or removed); rather he wants the religious training 
to be part of Friday’s real education, the course of instruction which will make him useful, 
and diligent in Robinson Crusoe’s personal projects and which, above all, will cure him of 
cannibalism.

This, incidentally, indicates a profound and historically important difference between the 
Puritan and the Catholic attitudes to the New World inhabitants.  To the Catholics the 
important goal was that the inhabitants of the New World should be converted, 
incorporated into the Christian community.  There was no lack of abominable treatment by 
many colonists, but there was always an official policy, often strenuously pursued, that the 
first goal must be an extension of Christian world through conversion, education, and 
intermarriage.

The Puritan emphasis was quite different.  The inhabitants of the New World were there 
to be ignored, like Friday’s father, used as servants, like Friday, or killed, like the 
cannibals.  The important part of the Puritan encounter with the New World was what 
Robinson Crusoe shows us, the spiritual testing of the solitary Protestant spirit, a life-long 
ordeal in which he achieved success (or the closest thing to a manifestation of success) by 
stamping his will on the new land, staking out territory as his property through 
backbreaking toil, without any concessions to anyone or anything, least of all to the land 
or to its original inhabitants.  That was the Puritan’s calling; that was the reason God has 
placed us on this earth: to put to our personal uses the material and people available, to 
ignore what does not fit in with such projects, and to remove quickly and ruthlessly 
anything that stands in our way.

[Compare overheads of Vespucci and Crusoe and Smith to make the point that in the 
Catholic vision, the first issue of the new territories was the native people, in the Puritan 
imagination the first and last issue was the land]

Postscript

I think the enormous popularity of Robinson Crusoe in the two hundred years after it was 
written goes hand in hand with the growing expansion of Puritanism and capitalism in all 
areas of English and North American life.  It has the form of a narrative which is as old as 
the Odyssey and Defoe is skilful enough to hold our attention with all sorts of particular 
details.  But the real popularity come from the vision it delivers, a value system which 
speaks eloquently to the countless people who lived a life not altogether unlike Robinson 
Crusoe’s, lonely years in hostile territory with little to go on but the strength of their 
bodies, the tools they brought with them, and the intense spiritual conviction that in 
carrying out the conquest of nature in the New World they were realizing God’s purposes 
for them.

I don’t want to leave a negative impression from my remarks on this text.  That is easy to 
do, because so much of the ethic of Robinson Crusoe depends on self-denial, of, in effect, 
blocking out so much of what life affords in order to channel all one’s energies into a 
comparatively narrow canal (or to use a metaphor of Tawney’s, the ethic is like the 
painting technique that, in order to focus all our attention of single spot of light, blacks 
everything else out).  We need to recognize that there is a certain heroism in this, not a 
heroism of the classical tradition, based on a well developed and wide ranging conception 
of excellence, but a heroism of the restricted spirit, protected in its inner fortress and 
prepared to take on whatever “afflictions” the world presents in order to bring one’s 
calling to a profitable conclusion.  A heroic assertion of the will in the service of a narrow 
calling, the sort of spiritual discipline that will provide the continuing discipline to tame a 
difficult wilderness.

That this ethic is important in the history of North America is, I take it, self-evident.  And 
almost all people here has some first-hand experience of it either in the way they were 
educated or in conversations with parents and grandparents.  For better or worse, this 
work ethic still helps to mould our political and social thinking (e.g., our sense that people 
who don’t make it are somehow spiritually inferior or that going on welfare is morally 
demeaning).  That view, so powerful for so long, may be weakening its grip (maybe), but 
we don’t have to be particularly perceptive to recognize its effects.

And no matter what we think of this novel or the various aspects of the vision of life I see 
in it, there are several people in this room who, consciously or not, live by Robinson 
Crusoe’s creed (secularized perhaps but still operative): they are willing to devote their 
lives to often very mundane toil in order to secure for themselves a powerful fortress 
against all potential invaders.  The value of their live is what goes on in that fortress, and 
their motivation for work comes from a dedication to the proposition that only if I can 
show a handsome profit over time, a surplus of goods in my fortress or my bank, will my 
life be a success.

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