Crusoe's experience on the deserted island allows him to take on many roles and occupations, effectively cataloguing the diversity of human experience. Through imagination and perception, Crusoe is able to project scenarios and replicate aspects of society in isolation. The island becomes an allegory for the human condition as Crusoe adjusts his perspective from "evil" to "good" and transforms the place from his "Island of Despair" to his "beloved Island". His story serves as an encyclopedia, demonstrating how human civilization has developed diverse skills through reason and practical experience.

2. The story of the castaway merchant-
adventurer, Robinson Crusoe, is among
the most widely recognized in world literature,
and even those who have never read the book
seem to know something of what is in it.
The island isolator belongs to the culture as an
archetype*– a man cast away on a deserted
island –and all the speculation (consideration)
attached to that scene constitutes a kind of
fictional parlor game.
(*archetype : a very typical example
of a certain person or thing.)

3. How would any man or woman react?
 What tools and materials would one
want?
What books would one wish to bring?
 What kind of company would prove
most desirable, if company were to
arrive at some time?
 How would one pass the hours, days,
months?
 How would one dispose space?

4.  Crusoe’s imagination.
 Island replicates:
verbal doubling
“evil” and “good”
 Island allegories

5. Crusoe seems afraid inside his cave (earthquakes) or
outside it (animals): “The fear of being swallowed up
alive, made me that I never slept in quiet, ”(p. 66).
He sees almost nothing and has to imagine almost
everything, but spares little detail in conjuring up
scenes:
First, I imagin’d that upon seeing my Light, they might
have put themselves into their Boat,…. other times I
imagin’d, that they might have lost their Boat before,…
Other times I imagin’d, they had some other Ship,… (p.
146)

6. He even imagines experiences beyond the
time that he actually stays on the island, as
when he comes upon an old goat dying in a
hollow and projects his own end as if he:
“had laid me down and dy’d, like the old
Goat in the Cave” (p. 141)

7. Crusoe at the end of the narrative tries to predict
what the English mutineers suddenly arrived on
his island will do and think, and guesses that
they will leave before collecting their lost
comrades.
“As soon as I perceiv’d them go towards the Shore,
I imagin’d it to be as it really was” (p. 205).
Here the imagined projection encounters the
imagined actuality, and both modes exist
comfortably for Defoe in terms of what human
beings are likely do and how they are likely to
think. To put perceptions together with
imagination is to produce fiction.(MICHAEL SEIDEL)

8. Imagination = fantasy
Perception = reality
Imagination + perception = fiction
To put perceptions together with
imagination is to produce fiction.
(MICHAEL SEIDEL)

9. Defoe tells the story over and over again in
various forms and sequences, Crusoe replicates
his story before he experiences it.
Example:
Crusoe in Brazil turns a profit on his sugar and
tobacco plantation, but worries that he has few
friends and lives in relative isolation
“just like a Man cast away upon some desolate
Island, that had no body there but himself” (p.
30).
Soon enough Defoe sets his hero in motion again
until he actually becomes a man cast away upon
some desolate island.
This is a metaphoric projection that comes true.

10. Another example:
Crusoe dreams before the Carib, Friday, arrives on
the island: “I dream’d, that as I was going out in
the Morning as usual from my Castle, I saw upon
the Shore, two Canoes, and eleven Savages coming
to Land, and that they brought with them another
Savage, who they were going to kill in Order to eat
him” (p. 155).
This is a dream that comes true later; the dreams
foreshadow the manner in which he saved “Friday”
afterwards.

11. Crusoe builds a replicate universe in isolation.
So instead of saying to himself that he climbs out
of the tree he slept in, he says “When I came down
from my Apartment” (p. 40).
he calls his cave his “Dining-room”(p. 60)
When he shows his habitation to the English sea
captain he calls it “my Castle, and my Residence”
(p. 201).

12.  Crusoe produces in his double-entry sheet a list of
“EVIL” and “GOOD,”
Evil Good
“I am cast upon a horrible
desolate Island (p.53)
“But I am alive and not
drown’d” (p.53)
“I have no Soul to speak to,
or relieve me”(p. 53)
“I have gotten out so many
necessary things [from the
wrecked ship] as will supply
my Wants as long as I live”
(pp. 53–54).

13.  A horizontal reading where one adjusts from
evil to good, from deficits to benefits, a
procedure that Crusoe sustains in the many
years of his island experience:
“there was something Negative or something
Positive to be thankful for in it” (p. 54).
 Crusoe begins by first calling the place his
“Island of Despair” (p. 56), but the same
place soon enough becomes
“my beloved Island” (p. 110).

14. The most obvious allegorical properties
of the island experience make Crusoe a
kind of Everyman in space and time.
What happens on the island is a kind of
centripetal force Defoe pulls all
normative human experience into
Crusoe’s sphere.
*Allegory: a story, poem, or picture which can be interpreted
to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one.

15. he possesses estates; he Labors for the
production of goods he then consumes or
utilizes, becoming a dedicated master of all
trades.
a seafarer
a merchant
a slave
a prisoner
a commander
a master
a planter
a governor
a king
a lord
an estate owner
a gentleman
a household manager
a carpenter
a tailor
a canoe-builder
a cook
a pipe-maker
a trapper
an emperor

16. The idea of the island experience as speeding
the development of the species and
cataloguing the occupations of humankind
makes Robinson Crusoe a kind of modern
encyclopedia.
The idea of the encyclopedia was a relatively
new phenomenon in the eighteenth century,
the goal of which was to include in its articles
the history of arts and sciences in human
civilization.

17. “by stating and squaring every thing by Reason, and by
making the most rational Judgment of things, every
Man may be in time Master of every mechanic Art” (p.
55).
Here, at the very end of a long stay on a
deserted island, Crusoe’s spaces and his
experiences answer to the needs of culture
and nature, and to all the variety of fictions
the mind produces to survive, to fill
time, and to endure.

18. References:
MICHAEL SEIDEL
Robinson Crusoe: varieties of fictional
experience