Robinson Crusoe as Bildungsroman

„Robinson Crusoe” as Bildungsroman

Daniel Defoe’s life is full of gaps and mysteries, of contradictions and dramatic turns. As a journalist, he excelled in the writing of the political pamphlet, and his criticism of the system made him highly controversial, and even landed him in prison. In time, his journalistic career in time gave birth to a literary career.
Defoe was sixty in 1719 when he wrote Robinson Crusoe, and during the following five years he was to write most of his fiction, thus becoming one of the most prolific writers. Defoe’s journalistic experience influenced both his style and his choice of characters. His heroes belong to the lower and middle class (Moll Flanders is a London prostitute, Robinson is the son of a lawyer); his novels tell their adventures and account for the way their experiences shape their characters. Defoe’s language is simple, plain, and expressive, again owing to the clarity required by journalistic writing. At the same time, his narrative strategies owe a lot to the popular writings of the day, to the Elizabethan romances, to the picaresque stories created either in England or on the continent, but also with other popular narratives, such as the lives of criminals, or contributory forms like the essay and biography.
Despite the popularity of some of his other writings, such as Moll Flanders (1722), the story of a London prostitute and of her progress towards middle-class respectability, undoubtedly the work by which posterity remembers Daniel Defoe remains Robinson Crusoe (1719). In literary history, the book is regarded not only as a classic travel and adventure story, but also as the prototype of the novel, because of its focus on the daily, external and internal activities of ordinary people, in its exploration of both the internal and of the external aspects of their existence. Inspired by the real story of the survival of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who had survived a five years of solitary existence on a desert island, Robinson Crusoe is presented as a story told by an old man about his adventurous life: his experiences on several sea voyages, his adventures as a slave with the Moors, as a planter in Brazil, as a castaway on a desert island, and finally his return to civilization. The novel covers thirty-five years, twenty eight of which cover Robinson’s stay on the desert island. These represent the most fascinating part of Defoe’s creation, as they follow both Robinson’s transformation of his environment, and his use of religion as a way of finding balance in his solitude. At the end of these twenty eight years, Robinson had managed to re-create on the island a small version of the world he had left behind. His help and servant is a native he names Friday, and his other companion is a parrot.
Robinson is rescued by a ship and returns to civilization, to take up his place in the social hierarchy he had rejected as a young boy.
Because of the emphasis on the development of the individual, Robinson Crusoe can also be interpreted as the fruit of a synthesis of two existing traditions: the picaresque novel and the personal journal or the memoir. The first emphasized the adventures of one individual in his journey to progress, and represented to some extent a modern version of an initiation journey at the end of which the hero finds maturity and respectability. The second emphasizes the mental states and evolutions of the individual, thus narrating the psychological processes that give shape the inner life of its heroes. Robinson does both. It is a first person narrative, and the action and events – the picaresque elements – are all filtered through the mind of the narrating-I – the journal elements. As a result, we can say that the novel maps the meanders of Robinson’s internal exploration of himself, of his process of coming of age, and of the creation of his personality as a fully grown man. Because of this, Robinson is also considered to be the prototypical Bildungsroman in English literature. The Bildungsroman is a literary genre that started in Germany, and is, in many respects, equivalent to a fictional autobiography. We consider to be Bildungsromans all the novels that deal with the development of a young man (or in some cases a young woman). According to the definitions of Webster’s Dictionary, a Bildungsroman is “a novel dealing with the education and development of its protagonist.” Of course, there are variations within the genre, and one or more elements may be left out of a particular novel, which makes it that novels such as Joyce’s Ulysses, or Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre can both be included in the category. However, the basic principles of education and development remain, as does the progress from childhood to adulthood. The basic formula of the Bildungsroman was especially suitable to the growing world of the Victorian age where the experiences of the hero of the Bildungsroman mirrored the actual ones, in the real world, for those moving from childhood to adulthood in that era.
Read in the bigger picture, Defoe’s book, as representative of the novel as literary genre, was rooted in the rise of the modern capitalist society. This odyssey of a middle class individual became in time a founding myth of bourgeois society. It offers the reader, even today, a small version of the larger processes that were reshaping the face of the world everywhere in the world: the Western spirit colonizing the world, dominating nature, ‘civilizing’ both the wilderness and those inhabitants. The novel can also be read as a metaphor of colonialism, the relationship between Robinson and Friday appearing as the archetype of colonial relations. At the same time, Robinson’s experiences mirror the internal journey of a Protestant individual, as in Defoe’s vision, the western entrepreneurial is inextricably connected to religion. But beyond such considerations, Robinson owes its popularity to being categorized as an exciting travel and adventure story.
Defoe wrote two sequels to the story: The farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720), but they failed to attract the public attention and have remained largely unknown.