Robinsone Crusoe(themes,motifs)

Themes, Motifs
Themes

The Ambivalence of Mastery:
Crusoe's success in mastering his situation, overcoming his obstacles, and controlling
his environment shows the condition of mastery in a positive light, at least at the
beginning of the novel. Crusoe lands in an inhospitable environment and makes it his
home. His taming and domestication of wild goats and parrots with Crusoe as their
master illustrates his newfound control. Moreover, Crusoe's mastery over nature
makes him a master of his fate and of himself. Early in the novel, he frequently
blames himself for disobeying his father's advice or blames the destiny that drove him
to sea. But in the later part of the novel, Crusoe stops viewing himself as a passive
victim and strikes a new note of self-determination. In building a home for himself on
the island, he finds that he is master of his life—he suffers a hard fate and still finds
prosperity.
But this theme of mastery becomes more complex and less positive after Friday's
arrival, when the idea of mastery comes to apply more to unfair relationships between
humans. In Chapter XXIII, Crusoe teaches Friday the word “[m]aster” even before
teaching him “yes” and “no,” and indeed he lets him “know that was to be [Crusoe's]
name.” Crusoe never entertains the idea of considering Friday a friend or equal—for
some reason, superiority comes instinctively to him. We further question Crusoe's
right to be called “[m]aster” when he later refers to himself as “king” over the natives
and Europeans, who are his “subjects.” In short, while Crusoe seems praiseworthy in
mastering his fate, the praiseworthiness of his mastery over his fellow humans is more
doubtful. Defoe explores the link between the two in his depiction of the colonial
mind.
The Necessity of Repentance:
Crusoe's experiences constitute not simply an adventure story in which thrilling things
happen, but also a moral tale illustrating the right and wrong ways to live one's life.
This moral and religious dimension of the tale is indicated in the Preface, which states
that Crusoe's story is being published to instruct others in God's wisdom, and one vital
part of this wisdom is the importance of repenting one's sins. While it is important to
be grateful for God's miracles, as Crusoe is when his grain sprouts, it is not enough
simply to express gratitude or even to pray to God, as Crusoe does several times with
few results. Crusoe needs repentance most, as he learns from the fiery angelic figure
that comes to him during a feverish hallucination and says, “Seeing all these things
have not brought thee to repentance, now thou shalt die.” Crusoe believes that his
major sin is his rebellious behavior toward his father, which he refers to as his
“original sin,” akin to Adam and Eve's first disobedience of God. This biblical
reference also suggests that Crusoe's exile from civilization represents Adam and
Eve's expulsion from Eden.
For Crusoe, repentance consists of acknowledging his wretchedness and his absolute
dependence on the Lord. This admission marks a turning point in Crusoe's spiritual
consciousness, and is almost a born-again experience for him. After repentance, he
complains much less about his sad fate and views the island more positively. Later,
when Crusoe is rescued and his fortune restored, he compares himself to Job, who
also regained divine favor. Ironically, this view of the necessity of repentance ends up
justifying sin: Crusoe may never have learned to repent if he had never sinfully
disobeyed his father in the first place. Thus, as powerful as the theme of repentance is
in the novel, it is nevertheless complex and ambiguous.
The Importance of Self-Awareness:
Crusoe's arrival on the island does not make him revert to a brute existence controlled
by animal instincts, and, unlike animals, he remains conscious of himself at all times.
Indeed, his island existence actually deepens his self-awareness as he withdraws from
the external social world and turns inward. The idea that the individual must keep a
careful reckoning of the state of his own soul is a key point in the Presbyterian
doctrine that Defoe took seriously all his life. We see that in his normal day-to-day
activities, Crusoe keeps accounts of himself enthusiastically and in various ways. For
example, it is significant that Crusoe's makeshift calendar does not simply mark the
passing of days, but instead more egocentrically marks the days he has spent on the
island: it is about him, a sort of self-conscious or autobiographical calendar with him
at its center. Similarly, Crusoe obsessively keeps a journal to record his daily
activities, even when they amount to nothing more than finding a few pieces of wood
on the beach or waiting inside while it rains. Crusoe feels the importance of staying
aware of his situation at all times. We can also sense Crusoe's impulse toward selfawareness
in the fact that he teaches his parrot to say the words, “Poor Robin Crusoe.
. . . Where have you been?” This sort of self-examining thought is natural for anyone
alone on a desert island, but it is given a strange intensity when we recall that Crusoe
has spent months teaching the bird to say it back to him. Crusoe teaches nature itself
to voice his own self-awareness.

Motifs:
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop
and inform the text's major themes.
Counting and Measuring:
Crusoe is a careful note-taker whenever numbers and quantities are involved. He does
not simply tell us that his hedge encloses a large space, but informs us with a
surveyor's precision that the space is “150 yards in length, and 100 yards in breadth.”
He tells us not simply that he spends a long time making his canoe in Chapter XVI,
but that it takes precisely twenty days to fell the tree and fourteen to remove the
branches. It is not just an immense tree, but is “five foot ten inches in diameter at the
lower part . . . and four foot eleven inches diameter at the end of twenty-two foot.”
Furthermore, time is measured with similar exactitude, as Crusoe's journal shows. We
may often wonder why Crusoe feels it useful to record that it did not rain on
December 26, but for him the necessity of counting out each day is never questioned.
All these examples of counting and measuring underscore Crusoe's practical,
businesslike character and his hands-on approach to life. But Defoe sometimes hints
at the futility of Crusoe's measuring—as when the carefully measured canoe cannot
reach water or when his obsessively kept calendar is thrown off by a day of
oversleeping. Defoe may be subtly poking fun at the urge to quantify, showing us
that, in the end, everything Crusoe counts never really adds up to much and does not
save him from isolation.
Eating
One of Crusoe's first concerns after his shipwreck is his food supply. Even while he is
still wet from the sea in Chapter V, he frets about not having “anything to eat or drink
to comfort me.” He soon provides himself with food, and indeed each new edible item
marks a new stage in his mastery of the island, so that his food supply becomes a
symbol of his survival. His securing of goat meat staves off immediate starvation, and
his discovery of grain is viewed as a miracle, like manna from heaven. His cultivation
of raisins, almost a luxury food for Crusoe, marks a new comfortable period in his
island existence. In a way, these images of eating convey Crusoe's ability to integrate
the island into his life, just as food is integrated into the body to let the organism grow
and prosper. But no sooner does Crusoe master the art of eating than he begins to fear
being eaten himself. The cannibals transform Crusoe from the consumer into a
potential object to be consumed. Life for Crusoe always illustrates this eat or be eaten
philosophy, since even back in Europe he is threatened by man-eating wolves. Eating
is an image of existence itself, just as being eaten signifies death for Crusoe.
Ordeals at Sea
Crusoe's encounters with water in the novel are often associated not simply with
hardship, but with a kind of symbolic ordeal, or test of character. First, the storm off
the coast of Yarmouth frightens Crusoe's friend away from a life at sea, but does not deter Crusoe. Then, in his first trading voyage, he proves himself a capable merchant,
and in his second one, he shows he is able to survive enslavement. His escape from
his Moorish master and his successful encounter with the Africans both occur at sea.
Most significantly, Crusoe survives his shipwreck after a lengthy immersion in water.
But the sea remains a source of danger and fear even later, when the cannibals arrive
in canoes. The Spanish shipwreck reminds Crusoe of the destructive power of water
and of his own good fortune in surviving it. All the life-testing water imagery in the
novel has subtle associations with the rite of baptism, by which Christians prove their
faith and enter a new life saved by Christ.
Symbols
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or
concepts.
The Footprint
Crusoe's shocking discovery of a single footprint on the sand in Chapter XVIII is one
of the most famous moments in the novel, and it symbolizes our hero's conflicted
feelings about human companionship. Crusoe has earlier confessed how much he
misses companionship, yet the evidence of a man on his island sends him into a panic.
Immediately he interprets the footprint negatively, as the print of the devil or of an
aggressor. He never for a moment entertains hope that it could belong to an angel or
another European who could rescue or befriend him. This instinctively negative and
fearful attitude toward others makes us consider the possibility that Crusoe may not
want to return to human society after all, and that the isolation he is experiencing may
actually be his ideal state.
The Cross
Concerned that he will “lose [his] reckoning of time” in Chapter VII, Crusoe marks
the passing of days “with [his] knife upon a large post, in capital letters, and making it
into a great cross . . . set[s] it up on the shore where [he] first landed. . . .” The large
size and capital letters show us how important this cross is to Crusoe as a timekeeping
device and thus also as a way of relating himself to the larger social world where
dates and calendars still matter. But the cross is also a symbol of his own new
existence on the island, just as the Christian cross is a symbol of the Christian's new
life in Christ after baptism, an immersion in water like Crusoe's shipwreck
experience. Yet Crusoe's large cross seems somewhat blasphemous in making no
reference to Christ. Instead, it is a memorial to Crusoe himself, underscoring how
completely he has become the center of his own life.
Crusoe's Bower
On a scouting tour around the island, Crusoe discovers a delightful valley in which he
decides to build a country retreat or “bower” in Chapter XII. This bower contrasts sharply with crusoe,s first residence ,sinceit is built not for the practical of shelter or storage for pleasure:"because I was so enamourd of the place" Crusoe is no longer focused solely on survival,which by this point in the novel is more or less secure.Now,for the first time since his arrival,he thinks in terms of "pleasantness".Thus, the bower symbolizes a radical improvement in Crusoe,s attitude toward his time on the island .Island life is no longer necessarily a disasater to suffer througt ,but may be an opportunity for enjoyment just as for the presbyterian ,life may be enjoied only after hard work has been finished and repentance achieved .


By/OMAR AHMED MAHMOD.