Or, Do you notice symbolic elements in Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe? Discuss.

Or, Discuss Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as a religious allegory.

Answer: An allegory is a story told behind the cloak of another story. On the surface level, Robinson Crusoe is the tale of adventure of a sea-faring man who goes on a journey to the sea against his parent’s will. He is shipwrecked, enslaved by the Moorish Africans, escaped from Sallee, and finally shipwrecked and marooned on a desolate island where he innovates every means of survival for years. But behind this surface meaning there heft a deeper meaning. On the secondary level, the story of Robinson Crusoe is read as a moral tale, a spiritual Journey, of a man who goes on a voyage to the sea of life, commits sins suffers, and is then baptized in seawater before his salvation.

The story of Robinson Crusoe is often read as an allegory of Defoe’s own life which was a sum total of suffering and misfortunes, and simultaneously, of profits, gains, and victories. We find a clear reflection of Defoe’s autobiography in a number of cases of Crusoe’s life. Crusoe’s mastery over the island can be explained as an effort to gain control over his own self, own psyche to be in communion with God.

In the course of the story, we find that Crusoe begins as an aimless wanderer and progresses as a pilgrim, crossing the mountainous setbacks and pitfalls to enter the promised land. We see Crusoe becoming closer to God, not through listening to sermons in a Church but through spending alone time only with a Bible to read. Defoe was himself a Puritan moralist and he worked a lot on how to be a good Puritan Christian. Robinson Crusoe is written with the same theological and moral points of view.

Robinson Crusoe is replete with religious elements. The Biblical story of Jonah is alluded to in the first part of the novel. Like Jonah, Crusoe neglects his ‘duty’ and is punished at sea. Crusoe’s departure from home can be interpreted from a religious perspective. He repeatedly refers to leaving home without his father’s permission as his ‘original sin’. He not only associates God and his father but regards his sin against his father as a sin against God also. Remembering his first voyage, Crusoe comments:

In the Puritan belief, the father was regarded as God’s deputy. In rejecting his father’s advice, Crusoe is committing Adam and Eve’s sin of disobedience. For Crusoe, as for Adam and Eve, disobedience grows out of restlessness and discontent with the “station” God assigned. When Crusoe is cast ashore on the deserted island, he sees his situation as the fulfillment of his father’s prediction that if Crusoe disregarded his advice, Crusoe would find himself alone with no source of help.

An eminent critic J P Hunter opines that Robinson Crusoe is not a hero, but an Everyman. Alone on the island, Crusoe becomes an Everyman alienated from God.

“Alone, alone, all, all alone

Alone on a wide, wide sea.” (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”)

Even the very term Robinson Crusoe is virtually synonymous with the word ‘Castaway” and is often used as a metaphor for being, rejected (from God’s mercy).

Defoe himself said in the “Preface” that his intent is “to justify and honor the wisdom of Providence all the ‘witty of our circumstances.” In the case of Crusoe, we find Providence to send him punishments and deliverance as if to awaken a sense of his sinfulness and to turn him to God. We have scope to say that the shipwrecks and his enslavement, his escape from slavery, and then from the island are not merely chances but evidence of God’s Providence. The duplication of dates for significant events is indisputable evidence of Providence at work. Crusoe notes that the date he ran away from his family is the same date he was, captured and made a slave, the day that he survived his first shipwreck is the same date he was cast ashore on the island, and the day he was born in the same day he was cast ashore, “so that my wicked life and my solitary life begun both on a day”-says Robinson Crusoe,

Throughout the story, Crusoe uses religious language, imagery, and Biblical references (at least 20 passages from the Bible) which reflect the extent to which his belief in Providence has permeated his life. He converts Friday to Christianity with the notion that he will be saving his soul through such conversion. Crusoe explains his shipwrecks, warnings from his father and from the captain of the first ship he sails on as God’s warning:

Providence, as in such cases generally it does, resolved to leave me entirely without excuse. For it I would not take this for deliverance, the next was to be such a one as the worst and most hardened wretch among us would confess both the danger and mercy.”

The discovery of barley and rice inspires Crusoe with a religious feeling as long as he believes their growth miraculous; but once he finds the rational explanation for their appearance he loses faith. Hence, wrathful God threatens him in a dream, he believes. It is not just a hallucination caused by fever or illness but, as Crusoe takes it a warning from God. After his dream and the beginning of his regeneration, his understanding and sense of God deepen. Crusoe turns to the Bible, studies it, and finds comfort, guidance and instruction in it for the first time in many years he prays, not for rescue from the island but for God’s help, ‘Lord be my help, for I am in great distress.” He kneels to God for the first time in his life and prays to God to fulfill His promise “that if I called upon Him in the day of trouble. He would deliver me.” He is now asking for God’s Grace, “Jesus, thou son of David, Jesus, thou exalted Prince and Saviour, give me repentance!” He comes to realize that spiritual deliverance from sin is more important than physical deliverance. from the island.

When Crusoe is delivered from the island by the English Captain, he acknowledges God’s power and Providence and “forgot not to lift up my heart in thankfulness to Heaven; and what heart could forbear to bless Him.” The religious dimension of Crusoe’s ordeal reaches its climax in his final salvation and reward. Crusoe so easily reclaims his earlier fortune and indeed, finds it no multiplied that the restoration of his possessions seems more like a miraculous windfall- manna from heaven — than mere good luck. We sense that Crusoe imagines God to be rewarding him for his devout patience, especially when he explicitly compares himself to Job: “I might well say now, indeed, that the latter end of Job was better than the beginning.

For Crusoe, the shipwreck, the decades of isolation, and the final rescue have not been merely events in a long adventure story but elements in a religious or moral tale of instruction. Implicitly, Crusoe makes his survival into proof of God’s approval of his faith in a particular religion. A reviewer for the Dublin University Magazine: called this book, “a great religious poem, showing that God is found where men are absent.”

Many readers are of the opinion that Crusoe’s references to God, Providence, and sin are extraneous to the real interest of the novel. They see the religious references as Defoe’s attempt to make his fiction acceptable to the large section of the readers who regarded fiction as lies that endangered the soul’s salvation. Despite this fact, we believe that religion plays an essential role in the novel.