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Essay on Characterization in Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" and Samuel Richardson's "Pamela"
Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe presents realistic characters in a realistic manner; as a result, many critics see him as the forerunner to writers like Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Hemingway. Robinson Crusoe on his island with Friday is a story "quite generalizable." Otherwise we could not trace on the theological map of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) the pattern of imperialism now commonly perceived in political, postcolonial readings of the novel. Robinson Crusoe's century and circumstances: He is marooned sixteen years earlier, sometime "presumably in July or August of 1643" (Defoe 1).
Robinson Crusoe begins his journal by giving the exact date of his arrival on his island, "30th of Sept. 1659," and his latitude: "9 degrees 22 minutes north of the line" (Defoe 81). Despite his Cartesian certitude about his locations in time and space, Crusoe does not truly know the full coordinates of his position, both latitude and longitude, for at the time he writes his journal and, for that matter, in 1719 when Defoe published his novel, there was no reliable method for calculating one's position in longitude in the remoter regions of the globe. The final push to solve the problem of longitude was, nevertheless, roughly contemporaneous with Defoe's career. Defoe shows the apparently solid ground of certitude that Robinson Crusoe possessed.
The impetus for the idea for Robinson Crusoe came to Defoe from his reading of the account of a man named Alexander Selkirk who, in a fit of anger, had himself put ashore on a deserted island. Defoe’s characterization is very strong. (Defoe 21)
Defoe's insertion of the dream sequence may seem a bit contrived by today's literary standards, but when Defoe was writing, works of fiction were relatively new and it was often the custom of alerting the reader to possible later events in a novel by having the main character have a hunch.....
