Crusoe in Exile

Abstract

Defoe calls Robinson Crusoe a “fugitive” fable, an “allegorical” narrative history that records on many levels the strains of displacement and the powers of reconstitution. Crusoe's experience offers Defoe the fictional opportunity to represent different sequences of narrative action that resemble and sometimes duplicate one another. Island exile for Crusoe substitutes for structurally comparable events—imaginative, psychological, religious, and, in the carefully worked out timing of the adventure, political. The politics of exile are especially significant for Crusoe's several transformative conversions, not merely his turning from place to place but his turning of one place into another. The classical exile, displaced abroad and replaced at home, becomes in Robinson Crusoe doubly situated—Crusoe's island home is literally remote but allegorically familiar. This paradox has narrative, historical, and national implications.