Both love and hate are pretty strong emotions and perhaps not entirely reflective of how I am feeling about Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe at the moment. I am alternately enjoying this and struggling with it. I am determined to finish it this week, however, so I am doing what I should have done a long time ago and concentrating solely on Rob Crusoe for the duration (hopefully short) that it will take to complete the last 100 pages or so.
According to the book blurb this is widely acknowledged as the first English novel, so I am quite pleased to be tackling it. From what I have read this was a great commercial success upon publication in 1719. A second edition was released within two weeks of the initial publication and pirated editions came out within hours of the book's release (interesting to see this phenomenon so far back). Apparently one of the pirated editions, called the "O" edition is now extremely valuable--what do you think the chances are of coming across that at the Salvation Army, eh?
Although on the surface this can be read as an adventure story, there are many, many moral undertones that can't be ignored. Robinson Crusoe leaves home, against his families wishes, to become a sailor. He survives one sinking ship, but decides to continue on as a sailor. He ends up a slave--seized by Moorish pirates. Several years later he manages to escape and ends up in Brazil where he becomes the owner of a plantation. Not content with his success, he sets off on an expedition to capture slaves in Africa and here he meets with a bad ending. He is shipwrecked. And here the real tale begins. He spends years and years creating his own "civilization". He sees this (being shipwrecked) as the price he has to pay for being a bad person and not listening to his parents. Then again he managed to survive, while his shipmates all drowned--so we go back and forth...is he forsaken or not. (Possible spoilers for the rest of this paragraph). Things got a bit draggy with all the building of fortifications and domestication of goats and drowning of cats (sorry...I know this is a survival tale, but I had a hard time with this....and a few other things). Finally...Rob discovers a footprint in the sand--not his own. And nothing is going to be the same again. There are savages who come to the island--cannibalistic savages. Rob manages to save one of the unfortunates before he is killed, and this is where I am in the story. It is interesting to see the parallels he makes between himself and the savages. But in the end the man he saves appears to become his slave. He calls the man Friday (the day he saved him), and teaches the man to call him Master. I am having a problem with Rob here. Not sure how I feel about this whole master thing after he himself was a slave. But I am interested to see how things will work out. Something definitely needed to happen in the story, and it happened not a moment too late! I am also reading The Mists of Avalon--a totally different story, but one that is told by a narrator who is a Pagan--unhappy with the newly infringing Christian ideals--talk about seeing the other side of the coin. There is so much to think about and respond to in Robinson Crusoe! I have saved the introduction to the book to read later, which was written by Virginia Woolf and I have a few other essays set aside as well. I am looking forward to reading what others have to say about this tale!
It has been a little hard getting used to the style of writing. My edition is made up of a dense narrative with no page or chapter breaks. There are many capitalizations (maybe all the nouns), which can be somewhat distracting. I noticed that the version on Project Gutenberg does not have these. It has been a challenge to stay with the story at times and I find if I am not concentrating that my mind tends to wander. And this is definitely a story that is best read in nice big chunks rather than a page or two here and there. And it has been slow going. All this said, however, I am really glad that I am reading this. I have a feeling that this is one of those pivotal books in literature, and I know later in my other readings a lightbulb will go off in my head when I am reading something else.