Robinson Crusoe, What did you think?

Well I just finished reading Robinson Crusoe earlier today and I found it very enjoyable. It was pretty much an account of an extended period of his life from the age of maturity until he was about 60. (I think) A lot of this time was spent on the island and I found it a simple, yet interesting read.
The book was adventure filled without going over the top like some do although the beginning of it almost lost me for it was a whole lot happening in a condensed period of time leading up to him landing upon the island.
Another stand out of the book for me was my favourite character Friday. Although he was not the main character in it I admired him very much. Along with this I noticed Defoe's views of coloured people at this time. He obviously saw them as inferior like the white people of the time did but he seemed to show respect to them. I got this impression by his inclusion of Friday and his father as friends of Crusoe despite refering to them as savages. One of the disappointments for me was that he failed to mention what became of Friday during the final years of the novel. I assume that he continued to follow Crusoe as a loyal servant wherever he went as his death would almost certainly get a mention in the story.

So in a brief summary that's my view, I thought it was well worth reading.

But what did you think of it? What did you observe and take from Robinson Crusoe?

I read it when I was about eleven-years-old and thought it a great story. There was, however, one thing about it that has bothered me ever since. It was when Crusoe found a footprint in the sand and realised he wasn't alone on the island. A single footprint...?

Yeah the footprint was a bit weird. He suggested the possibilities that he suspected like the savages or the devil but he ruled them out because the devil wouldn't appear to him in human form on a desert island and the savages would have left more tracks. So after ruling out all the possibilities he just forgets about it, a conclusion for this was necessary. All I could think of was that it was his own footprint but he would have realised that he had walked there before so I'm not sure.

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Originally Posted by Big Dante

Yeah the footprint was a bit weird. He suggested the possibilities that he suspected like the savages or the devil but he ruled them out because the devil wouldn't appear to him in human form on a desert island and the savages would have left more tracks. So after ruling out all the possibilities he just forgets about it, a conclusion for this was necessary. All I could think of was that it was his own footprint but he would have realised that he had walked there before so I'm not sure.

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But even then there would be more than one.

To be perfectly honest, I thought it was dull as dishwater. Defoe spends about 250 pages describing all his innovations and adjustments to his primitive surroundings. Eventually, he finds a footprint in the sand, to his consternation, then a couple of years later he makes peace with it. Savages arrive then leave. A couple of years later, he makes peace with that. Then more people arrive, and suddenly he's MacGuyver and Aristotle rolled into one.

That's another thing: He spends upward of twenty years without so much of a hint of human contact nor any hope of any, and he's perfectly rational about how to go about his life. I've 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?

Aw, 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 I'm not ever going to read it again, either.

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Originally Posted by Insane4Twain

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?

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Yes, that was a bit of a problem. I tended to stop at a page that started with a new sentence, when I could find one.

I like short chapters. As I said elsewhere, there is something very boring about Defoe despite the exciting material.