مغامرات روبنسون كروزو Robinson crusoe

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Ambivalence of Mastery

Crusoe’s success in mastering his situation, overcoming his obstacles,
and controlling his environment shows the condition of mastery in a
positive light, at least at the beginning of the novel. Crusoe lands in
an inhospitable environment and makes it his home. His taming and
domestication of wild goats and parrots with Crusoe as their master
illustrates his newfound control. Moreover, Crusoe’s mastery over nature
makes him a master of his fate and of himself. Early in the novel, he
frequently blames himself for disobeying his father’s advice or blames
the destiny that drove him to sea. But in the later part of the novel,
Crusoe stops viewing himself as a passive victim and strikes a new note
of self-determination. In building a home for himself on the island, he
finds that he is master of his life—he suffers a hard fate and still
finds prosperity.
But this theme of mastery becomes more complex and less positive after
Friday’s arrival, when the idea of mastery comes to apply more to unfair
relationships between humans. In Chapter XXIII, Crusoe teaches Friday
the word “[m]aster” even before teaching him “yes” and “no,” and indeed
he lets him “know that was to be [Crusoe’s] name.” Crusoe never
entertains the idea of considering Friday a friend or equal—for some
reason, superiority comes instinctively to him. We further question
Crusoe’s right to be called “[m]aster” when he later refers to himself
as “king” over the natives and Europeans, who are his “subjects.” In
short, while Crusoe seems praiseworthy in mastering his fate, the
praiseworthiness of his mastery over his fellow humans is more doubtful.
Defoe explores the link between the two in his depiction of the
colonial mind.

The Necessity of Repentance

Crusoe’s experiences constitute not simply an adventure story in which
thrilling things happen, but also a moral tale illustrating the right
and wrong ways to live one’s life. This moral and religious dimension of
the tale is indicated in the Preface, which states that Crusoe’s story
is being published to instruct others in God’s wisdom, and one vital
part of this wisdom is the importance of repenting one’s sins. While it
is important to be grateful for God’s miracles, as Crusoe is when his
grain sprouts, it is not enough simply to express gratitude or even to
pray to God, as Crusoe does several times with few results. Crusoe needs
repentance most, as he learns from the fiery angelic figure that comes
to him during a feverish hallucination and says, “Seeing all these
things have not brought thee to repentance, now thou shalt die.” Crusoe
believes that his major sin is his rebellious behavior toward his
father, which he refers to as his “original sin,” akin to Adam and Eve’s
first disobedience of God. This biblical reference also suggests that
Crusoe’s exile from civilization represents Adam and Eve’s expulsion
from Eden.
For Crusoe, repentance consists of acknowledging his wretchedness and
his absolute dependence on the Lord. This admission marks a turning
point in Crusoe’s spiritual consciousness, and is almost a born-again
experience for him. After repentance, he complains much less about his
sad fate and views the island more positively. Later, when Crusoe is
rescued and his fortune restored, he compares himself to Job, who also
regained divine favor. Ironically, this view of the necessity of
repentance ends up justifying sin: Crusoe may never have learned to
repent if he had never sinfully disobeyed his father in the first place.
Thus, as powerful as the theme of repentance is in the novel, it is
nevertheless complex and ambiguous.

The Importance of Self-Awareness

Crusoe’s arrival on the island does not make him revert to a brute
existence controlled by animal instincts, and, unlike animals, he
remains conscious of himself at all times. Indeed, his island existence
actually deepens his self-awareness as he withdraws from the external
social world and turns inward. The idea that the individual must keep a
careful reckoning of the state of his own soul is a key point in the
Presbyterian doctrine that Defoe took seriously all his life. We see
that in his normal day-to-day activities, Crusoe keeps accounts of
himself enthusiastically and in various ways. For example, it is
significant that Crusoe’s makeshift calendar does not simply mark the
passing of days, but instead more egocentrically marks the days he has
spent on the island: it is about him, a sort of self-conscious or
autobiographical calendar with him at its center. Similarly, Crusoe
obsessively keeps a journal to record his daily activities, even when
they amount to nothing more than finding a few pieces of wood on the
beach or waiting inside while it rains. Crusoe feels the importance of
staying aware of his situation at all times. We can also sense Crusoe’s
impulse toward self-awareness in the fact that he teaches his parrot to
say the words, “Poor Robin Crusoe. . . . Where have you been?” This sort
of self-examining thought is natural for anyone alone on a desert
island, but it is given a strange intensity when we recall that Crusoe
has spent months teaching the bird to say it back to him. Crusoe teaches
nature itself to voice his own self-awareness.

Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Counting and Measuring

Crusoe is a careful note-taker whenever numbers and quantities are
involved. He does not simply tell us that his hedge encloses a large
space, but informs us with a surveyor’s precision that the space is “150
yards in length, and 100 yards in breadth.” He tells us not simply that
he spends a long time making his canoe in Chapter XVI, but that it
takes precisely twenty days to fell the tree and fourteen to remove the
branches. It is not just an immense tree, but is “five foot ten inches
in diameter at the lower part . . . and four foot eleven inches diameter
at the end of twenty-two foot.” Furthermore, time is measured with
similar exactitude, as Crusoe’s journal shows. We may often wonder why
Crusoe feels it useful to record that it did not rain on December 26,
but for him the necessity of counting out each day is never questioned.
All these examples of counting and measuring underscore Crusoe’s
practical, businesslike character and his hands-on approach to life. But
Defoe sometimes hints at the futility of Crusoe’s measuring—as when the
carefully measured canoe cannot reach water or when his obsessively
kept calendar is thrown off by a day of oversleeping. Defoe may be
subtly poking fun at the urge to quantify, showing us that, in the end,
everything Crusoe counts never really adds up to much and does not save
him from isolation.

Eating

One of Crusoe’s first concerns after his shipwreck is his food supply.
Even while he is still wet from the sea in Chapter V, he frets about not
having “anything to eat or drink to comfort me.” He soon provides
himself with food, and indeed each new edible item marks a new stage in
his mastery of the island, so that his food supply becomes a symbol of
his survival. His securing of goat meat staves off immediate starvation,
and his discovery of grain is viewed as a miracle, like manna from
heaven. His cultivation of raisins, almost a luxury food for Crusoe,
marks a new comfortable period in his island existence. In a way, these
images of eating convey Crusoe’s ability to integrate the island into
his life, just as food is integrated into the body to let the organism
grow and prosper. But no sooner does Crusoe master the art of eating
than he begins to fear being eaten himself. The cannibals transform
Crusoe from the consumer into a potential object to be consumed. Life
for Crusoe always illustrates this eat or be eaten philosophy, since
even back in Europe he is threatened by man-eating wolves. Eating is an
image of existence itself, just as being eaten signifies death for
Crusoe.

Ordeals at Sea

Crusoe’s encounters with water in the novel are often associated not
simply with hardship, but with a kind of symbolic ordeal, or test of
character. First, the storm off the coast of Yarmouth frightens Crusoe’s
friend away from a life at sea, but does not deter Crusoe. Then, in his
first trading voyage, he proves himself a capable merchant, and in his
second one, he shows he is able to survive enslavement. His escape from
his Moorish master and his successful encounter with the Africans both
occur at sea. Most significantly, Crusoe survives his shipwreck after a
lengthy immersion in water. But the sea remains a source of danger and
fear even later, when the cannibals arrive in canoes. The Spanish
shipwreck reminds Crusoe of the destructive power of water and of his
own good fortune in surviving it. All the life-testing water imagery in
the novel has subtle associations with the rite of baptism, by which
Christians prove their faith and enter a new life saved by Christ.

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

The Footprint

Crusoe’s shocking discovery of a single footprint on the sand in Chapter
XVIII is one of the most famous moments in the novel, and it symbolizes
our hero’s conflicted feelings about human companionship. Crusoe has
earlier confessed how much he misses companionship, yet the evidence of a
man on his island sends him into a panic. Immediately he interprets the
footprint negatively, as the print of the devil or of an aggressor. He
never for a moment entertains hope that it could belong to an angel or
another European who could rescue or befriend him. This instinctively
negative and fearful attitude toward others makes us consider the
possibility that Crusoe may not want to return to human society after
all, and that the isolation he is experiencing may actually be his ideal
state.

The Cross

Concerned that he will “lose [his] reckoning of time” in Chapter VII,
Crusoe marks the passing of days “with [his] knife upon a large post, in
capital letters, and making it into a great cross . . . set[s] it up on
the shore where [he] first landed. . . .” The large size and capital
letters show us how important this cross is to Crusoe as a timekeeping
device and thus also as a way of relating himself to the larger social
world where dates and calendars still matter. But the cross is also a
symbol of his own new existence on the island, just as the Christian
cross is a symbol of the Christian’s new life in Christ after baptism,
an immersion in water like Crusoe’s shipwreck experience. Yet Crusoe’s
large cross seems somewhat blasphemous in making no reference to Christ.
Instead, it is a memorial to Crusoe himself, underscoring how
completely he has become the center of his own life.

Crusoe’s Bower

On a scouting tour around the island, Crusoe discovers a delightful
valley in which he decides to build a country retreat or “bower” in
Chapter XII. This bower contrasts sharply with Crusoe’s first residence,
since it is built not for the practical purpose of shelter or storage,
but simply for pleasure: “because I was so enamoured of the place.”
Crusoe is no longer focused solely on survival, which by this point in
the novel is more or less secure. Now, for the first time since his
arrival, he thinks in terms of “pleasantness.” Thus, the bower
symbolizes a radical improvement in Crusoe’s attitude toward his time on
the island. Island life is no longer necessarily a disaster to suffer
through, but may be an opportunity for enjoyment—just as, for the
Presbyterian, life may be enjoyed only after hard work has been finished
and repentance achieved

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