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Robinson Crusoe Defoe was not consciously writing a novel which has been an accepted notion. Robinson Crusoe is indebted to many travel books and it remains until date a highly scientific work full of accurate data. It may be regarded as a novel of romantic adventure and at the same time, a children’s adventure story, Crusoe being both a hero and an archetype of homo economicus, a man for whom everything can be rendered in terms of double entry book-keeping, as well as an Adam who builds his second paradise in the island.
Crusoe right from the beginning fictionalizes the need for individualism and private enterprise through the actions and adventures of its chief protagonist. Ian Watt regards it more as a myth than a novel, one which naturally falls into place with Faust, and Don Quixote among others. Faust with his insatiable curiosity to know, Quixote with his almost blind faith in chivalric idealism has always been regarded as cultural heroes depicting the aspirations and pursuits of Western man. In a similar vein, Crusoe too has come to be associated with a triumph of human achievement and enterprise, one standing against all odds and celebrating the status of a rebel who, “without asking God’s blessing, or my Father’s, without any consideration of Circumstances or Consequences” set out on his first sea adventure, in spite of the character being imaginary.
At one level, the text seeks to represent and recreate in terms of empirical realism, the socio-economic and sexual underworlds of eighteenth century England, using a self-reflexive autobiographical narrative mode. This is one reason why contextualizing the text becomes an important aspect of understanding the finer textual nuances and the sub-text of the novel. The dexterity with which Crusoe masters nature after he finds himself in an uninhabited island can be viewed in two ways –
1. As part of the individualist human enterprise that the novel partly celebrates,
2. As part of the colonial enterprise that the novel as a whole projects.
According to the first point, Crusoe (as has already been mentioned) is often regarded as an ‘economic man’ who uses nature to his benefit thereby setting an example of the triumph of human achievement and enterprise. The other point that highlights England’s status as a rising Empire reveals a complex colonizer-colonized relationship that not only forms an integral part of reading Robinson Crusoe but also allows multiple counter readings and responses.
Postcolonial studies are concerned with the various kinds of representation/ misrepresentation of non-European cultures within European literary texts. A discursive understanding of such a concern leads to processes of re-reading and re-writing literary texts for furthering an anti-colonial as well as a postcolonial view. Postcolonial authors challenge the imperial ideologies inculcated and stabilized through the British canonical texts. A. D. Hope’s poem “Man Friday” (1958) is an earlier response to Robinson Crusoe concerned with what happens to Friday after he has been “rescued” from the island along with Crusoe. He regards himself as a castaway in ‘England’s Desert Island’ and strives to protect his identity as a “natural” man among the “cultured”. Like Defoe’s Friday, J. M. Coetzee’s Friday in Foe (1986) also reached England. Foe is a post modern novel that interrogates and subverts the master-slave paradigm implicit in Robinson Crusoe with the help of a female narrator Susan Barton and a ‘tongueless’ and ‘speechless’ Friday. Derek Walcott’s Pantomime (1978) is another work that “writes back” to Defoe’s “master” narrative of empire.
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