I smiled to myself at the sight of this money. “O drug!” said I aloud, “what art thou good for? Thou art not worth to me, no, not the taking off of the ground. One of those knives is worth all these heap. I have no manner of use of thee…”
Answer: This is an extract from the 6th Chapter of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The title hero Robinson Crusoe speaks these lines. These lines express Crusoe’s contradictory relationship with money he found on board the wrecked ship near his island.
When Crusoe discovers a handsome amount of gold, silver, and w money on board the wrecked ship, he declares it as worthless. But upon his second thought, he wraps up all these in a piece of the knife is more useful than a heap of gold and money, we do not find him to be able to disregard the tantalization of these material things for long. Here, we foresee a conflict between his spiritual aims (scorning worldly wealth) and material ambitions (hoarding gold and money) and it reflects the novel’s tension between the practical and the religious. He calls money a drug and he is addicted to it. But he seems to willfully fail to practice what he preaches. There is an unusual admixture of disdain and desire for money.
Crusoe’s mixed feelings about gold and money also reflect his nostalgia for human society, since he tells us that money has no value in itself unless it is used in human society. It has only a social worth. This reminds us that he may be a social creature despite his isolation.
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