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Stranded with Robinson Crusoe
By Riverboat in Flotsam and Jetsam
February 5, 2012

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I recently finished reading Robinson Crusoe. It’s considered a classic. Or, as Mark Twain would say, it’s a book that people praise and don’t read. In this case, it’s been read AND praised, but the praise has been misplaced.

To be perfectly honest, I thought it was dull as dishwater. Defoe spends about 250 out of 300 pages describing all his innovations and adjustments to his primitive surroundings. Halfway through the book he finds, to his consternation, a single footprint in the sand. A couple of years later he makes peace with that. Thirty pages and a couple more years later, savages arrive with his guy Friday whom he rescues from becoming an entrée on the beach. In spite of 200 pages of previous introspective soul-searching and philosophical inquiry into the nature of man and relative versus concrete values, Crusoe ensures his place in the hierarchy of the world by instructing Friday to refer to him as Master, and makes an abode for his servant that is literally below him in his so-called castle. And he makes peace with THAT.

Another 30 pages later, more people arrive. This time they’re Europeans, and they mean business. Suddenly he's MacGuyver, Aristotle and Patton rolled into one. In less time than he spent figuring out how to trap the wild goats on the island, he traps the principals of a mutiny, and places the unseated captain back in his bark and sets sail away from the island he loved – no, hated! – back to his home in England. Or was it Brazil?

Robinson Crusoe He spends upward of twenty years without so much as a hint of human contact, nor any hope of any, and he's perfectly rational about how to go about his life. I'd always thought that the worst punishment for a criminal was to put him in solitary confinement. A more genuine depiction would have shown the growing insanity of his mind without his being aware of it, like the protagonist in Flowers For Algernon (just comparing, mind you. Yes, I know the character was retarded, not insane in the latter).

What made it truly maddening for me as a reader was the lack of any breaks whatsoever. Where do you put your book down with nary a chapter break?

Aww, I'm glad I read it, I guess, if for no other reason than it's a classic and a touchstone of many other works. It's not Gilligan's Island. But it’s not Ernest Shackleton, either.