Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island: Chapter Analysis

The passage contains the beginning events of chapter fifteen in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883). After eavesdropping on Long John Silver's (the antagonist) planned mutiny, Jim Hawkins (the protagonist) flees from the area and encounters a wild-looking man named Ben Gunn who he befriends later on. Early nineteenth-century classic adventure stories encouraged boys to support, administer, or fight for the Empire (M.O. Grenby, 192). And so, the passage exhibits Jim's initial transition from child to a young man as he practises colonialist qualities (perseverance, pluck, and resourcefulness). Something Jim puts into effect beyond the passage (in particular chapter twenty-one ‘The Attack’). Although, we must understand how Britain's declining empire towards the early twentieth century can relate to changing attitudes on the
For example, his choppy movements (“drew back, came forward again”) is like he plays a game (132); and also has odd child-like syntax (pirate vernacular) in his dialogue: “I’m poor Ben Gunn, I am;” (133). By the late nineteenth century, Britain’s imperial dominance decline alongside attitudes towards adventure stories, as the mid-Victorian “hero” became the Late-Victorian “coward” (Grenby, 179). Stevenson’s criticism of imperialism relates to Ben Gunn as a pirate. As in literature and history, pirates should serve as: “Foreign competition in imperial acquisition” (M. Daphne Kutzer qtd in Noimann, 61), but instead, Ben Gunn begs for a “Christian diet” and bargains with Jim so that he returns home like a lost child (134). Ben Gunn’s character here relates to the declining “Golden Age of Piracy” and the British empire, as what were once influential figures for boys at the time (pirates / colonialists) are now powerless by the twentieth-century. Therefore, Stevenson criticises imperialism through the fragile masculinity it impacts on characters like Jim Hawkins and Ben