Just read Robinson Crusoe for the first time and wow, what a great book! I think it’s earned a permanent place on the nightstand. I have never found a more effective or side-effectless OTC sleeping pill.
Seriously, the thing is awful. The pacing is terrible and repetitive. The writing is lackluster, especially near the end and the concepts are, from a modern vantage point alternately preachy and racist. Ignoring the whole ‘first english novel’ and its place as the progenitor of a whole genre of adventure/survival stories, what does this book have to offer, in your opinion?
For me, I simply can’t get over how boring the thing is. It’s not like storytelling was in its infancy, along with the novel. Why did Defoe think it was appropriate to end the book with a chapter and a half of checkbook balancing? Did he think people were on tenterhooks the whole time he was making yet another failed canoe wondering what was going on with the widow? Gah! I’ve had to read a lot of painful texts over the years and this book has taken the cake, table, stand and server.
Especially a passage early in the novel where Crusoe escapes slavery amid the Moors, along with another slave. Then once Crusoe gets clear, he sells the other slave to someone else.
His relationship with Friday is actually kind of touching (for a master-slave relationship), and psychologically realistic. Crusoe is so lonely for so long that he cannot relegate Friday just to another slave. And then Crusoe is teaching Friday Christianity, I get the feeling that Defoe is taking some not-very-subtle digs at the naivete of Crusoe’s faith.
And then when Friday’s father shows up and is rescued, I found the affection Friday shows towards his father to complete the arc. Defoe presents Friday as a loyal and steadfast character, even apart from being “a good darky” to Crusoe for saving his life. Friday’s loyalty to his father contrasts strongly to Crusoe’s rejection and abandonment of his father.
The part that bothers me is that Crusoe had to be in his seventies by the end of the novel, but no reference is ever made to the fact.
Wiki describes it as “Epistolary, confessional, and didactic…”. Perhaps entertaining in it’s day but I never finished reading it because it wasn’t entertaining to me. I will suppose that it was a work of philosophy, hypothesizing life of a ship-wrecked man and an opinion of the occupation of his mind.
Your first couple of sentences really concerned me! For a moment I thought you liked it. Yeah it’s a terrible book.
A lot of those books suck after years of maturity. I tried to read Swiss Family Robinson, aka the story of the Whitest Survival Story, and was extremely distressed to see this family was punting penguins!
Really they killed every damn animal they came across, whether they wanted to eat it or not. Sicced their dog on a bunch of others. And we wonder why animals went extinct.
I have a certain affection for this book because it’s the first I ever remember owning.
My father worked for Goodyear for many years. When I was in kindergarten or so there was a company Christmas party and employees got to take gifts home to their kids. Dad was late and that year, instead of a small Teddy bear or something like that all that was left were books. I couldn’t even read yet, but I got the book, and I remember looking at the pictures and wondering what was going on.
I still have that very copy, battered and held together with a rubber band. I look at those same pictures and now I can’t imagine not knowing what the printing was saying.
I had kids books before that I think, but this is the first I really recall getting.
Serious question: Have you read many two-hundred-plus-year-old novels?
They were written for a very different audience — people with a lot of time on their hands and not a lot to do. From Defoe through Dickens, what strikes me the most about older books (many of which I love, although I’ve never read RC) is that the readers sure wanted to spend as much time as possible exploring these fictitious locales and characters.
It’s pretty easy to pillory a work if you’re going to dismiss any ground it broke! Even easier if you’re also going to judge it solely by modern standards.
I remember reading it sometime in middle school, and the parts I found most evocative were the actual descriptions of survival. Pillaging the ship, setting up his homestead, rationing supplies, etc. The boy scout in me said, “yeah! I could totally do all of that! Sounds awesome!”
Me too. I read it in high school, and enjoyed it quite.
I guess we could form a “Gabriel Betteredge Society.”
(In Wilkie Collins’ “The Moonstone,” Betteredge was a character obsessed with Robinson Crusoe, holding that all worldly wisdom could be found in that book. The first motion the society shall adopt is blackballing Inner Stickler.)
Many of the authors during that time were also paid by the word so I’m sure they were willing to oblige readers by padding things out with these details.
I thought it was interesting, but it wasn’t what I expected. There’s the extended beginning part before he reaches his deserted island, for instance, and at one point the narrative jumps forward something like 20 years.
But I liked the survival narrative – like an old-timey version of “Cast Away”. And I’ve read quite a bit of 18th and 19th century literature, so the slower pace didn’t bother me.
It wasn’t the wordiness. Dickens is wordy as well, but his books are so much more elegantly plotted. Robinson Crusoe has some fatal, or what should be fatal, narrative humps to get over. I read Dickens; I won’t be reading any more Defoe.
I meant is it good in and of itself in your opinion or good only because it was first? And I went into it initially intending to give it the benefit of the doubt in terms of the racism. I didn’t particularly care for Robinson selling Xury to the ship captain but I tried to remember that it was a different time. By the time I got to: “I let him know his name should be Friday, which was the day I saved his life: I called him so for the memory of the time. I likewise taught him to say Master; and then let him know that was to be my name” however, I’d had my fill of historical racism.
Defoe was more than a century before Dickens. It’s not fair to compare them. One was born during the Industrial Revolution, the other within historical touching distance of Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil War. I assume the markets they catered for were very different.
It’s been a long time since I read Robinson Crusoe. I do remember enjoying it more than I did most other historical fiction. Someone earlier mentioned Boy Scouts; to me it is reminiscent of Farmville, or the opening sequence of Game of Thrones. Im rather casual about perceived racism today, im very casual about historical racism in fiction. Some of the racial and non racial themes are still relevent enough today. It’s not as if racism, paternalism, nation-building and economic progress are unknown to our political and philosophical debates today.
I won a copy of the book when I was about 11, and was totally enthralled by it. My book had wonderful illustrations, and I think I loved them more than the text. And it may have been abridged, which helped.
In one sense, it’s good because I enjoyed it as a kid.
In a different sense it’s good because it was first. Dismissing that is like saying the Model T was a piece of shit because it only had a top speed of 40 mp/h. You can’t judge it in a vacuum. You certainly can’t judge a 300-year-old novel solely by your modern sensibilities.
Honestly, I haven’t read it since I was a kid. Maybe if I gave it a re-read I’d agree that it doesn’t have much to offer to an adult these days, and I certainly skipped over a lot (most? all?) of the drier parts when I was 11.
But to answer your original question: what does it have to offer? The survivalist parts were super entertaining to young Johnny Bravo. To this day I really enjoy reading accounts like that (I also really liked Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf, which had a desert island narrative), and it probably all stems from reading Robinson Crusoe.