Study notes: Robinson Crusoe
Crusoe ignores his father’s advice, goes to sea, and ends up alone on an island after a wreck. He salvages tools, grows food, and builds a shelter. Years later he meets Friday, a man he rescues and then treats as a servant. Defoe helped invent the English novel of survival. The island chapters are full of practical detail. The book also carries the prejudices of an eighteenth-century English trader, and a modern reading has to say that out loud.
Themes
Skill and patience. Isolation. Power: who gets to name whom, and who is called a servant.
People to follow
Robinson Crusoe and Friday, plus the sailors and owners in the chapters before the island.
Talk about
- Which of Crusoe’s skills would actually matter on an island?
- How does the book treat Friday, and what is unfair in that treatment?
- Is being alone the same as being free?
Public-domain text.