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Robinson Crusoe with Economic

Introduction

Crusoe's goal is adventure, but also adventure by way of major profit. Crusoe is involved in early mercantile capitalism. He buys and sells things and is very interested in making cashola. As a man of trade, Crusoe is very interested in acquisition of goods and wealth. The novel often catalogues in great detail how much money he makes, even when he's on an island where such things don't matter (Defoe: 15-168). Remember, though, Crusoe's involvement in trade also deeply implicates him in the slave trade. He not only buys and sells commodities, but also human beings.

Discussion

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 in the light of what I have just observed about stories like this one(Keynes: 755-69).

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, like Gulliver, 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(Cobley: 13-115).

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 ...