Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe is well known in its essentials even to people who have never read it. They know it is the story of a man who is shipwrecked on a deserted island and who has to come to terms with his loneliness, teaching himself how to survive under these conditions, and eventually finding a native on the island who becomes his aide and whom he calls Friday after the day they met. They may be less aware of the social criticism and irony embedded in this story. This story is said by its author to be an allegory. In this regard, the author further notes that by this he means it has been written to counter the prevailing desire to do nothing more than amuse, and yet this book has more in mind precisely by being an allegory. There is an ironic tension in the juxtaposition of this statement about not wishing only to amuse and the novel itself, which seems to many to be only an attempt to amuse. Underlying all of this is the inherent social criticism Defoe has structured into the novel.
Defoe's hero, Robinson Crusoe, is faced with a dilemma once he is shipwrecked on the island--he has a desire to maintain himself as a civilized human being and to preserve the civilized ways he has known in England. Crusoe is in many ways a driven man. He never rests once he is on the island, always fighting to maintain a sense of himself as a civilized human being and in the process having to turn to primitive ways to achieve some level of civilization. Defoe was much taken with the spiritual and emotional course to be taken by his hero, for he sees the ordeal of his hero as proof that there is a God at work in this world, dedicated as well to preserving civilization against the onslaught from the secular temptations that come our way. Crusoe is forced into isolation, and in isolation he can be that much closer to God because he is that much more able to meditate and achieve a union with the infinite.
In "The Preface,...