Can we consider Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe a novel?

[Zaka-Rioss Zack]

Good evening everyone

The features of the novel may not apply on robinson crusoe since robinson crusoe was based on a collection of journals that belong to someone who did in fact have a real experience on an island
So what do you think?

[kev67]

I think Robinson Crusoe was inspired by a real castaway, Alexander Selkirk, according to Wikipedia, which also lists three other possible sources. However, Robinson Crusoe was still fiction. Robinson Crusoe was a pretty different character to Alexander Selkirk. Their stories were pretty different. Selkirk was put ashore; Crusoe was shipwrecked. Selkirk was a privateer; Crusoe was a plantation owner on sea voyage to buy slaves. Selkirk was marooned for four years; Crusoe, 24. They both became adept at exploiting their island's resources, making clothes, building huts and craftwork things.

[ennison]

It's fiction. It looks like a novel, reads like a novel, tastes like one. Selkirk was an interesting fellow from Largo in Fife. He was always a rebel. Crusoe though is a more interesting fellow who sprang from the brain of Defoe - a very interesting Englishman (He didn't like us Scots much!) I've always admired the vast teeming creativity of Defoe and since childhood believed his novel about Crusoe to be one of my favorite books. Dudley D Watkins produced an excellent illustrated version which led me towards the real thing as a child. It is a novel but perhaps it is other things as well. It is exceedingly Protestant in its spiritual outlook on the world.

[OrphanPip]

The problem of Robinson Crusoe's generic classification I think doesn't arise from whether it was based on journals or not. Defoe experimented with fictionalized version of a number of genres which at the time were considered to be forms of history rather than fiction. Prose fiction at the time was associated with French romances and their imitators, like Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess. All of Defoe's novels are based on non-fictional genres that he transformed while attempting to create a new form of writing that was neither romance nor history. Roxanna and Moll Flanders are based on whore biographies which were quite popular at the time. A Journal of the Plague Year and Robinson Crusoe are transformations of first hand accounts and travel stories that were even more popular. Fiction was so heavily stigmatized that Defoe went through great lengths in the early years to claim the authenticity of his books, which he claimed were true in ideas and spirit if not in fact. Whether Crusoe is a novel or not I think comes down to semantics and what we consider essential elements of the novel, but it's definitely at least a proto-novel and part of the tradition of fictional narratives that would eventually develop into the realist novel.

[kev67]

If Robinson Crusoe was based on Selkirk's journals, they must be the good part. I enjoyed the parts where Crusoe was building his huts, growing crops, domesticating goats and digging out canoes. I did not enjoy the beginning and the end so much when he is off the island, where it seemed more made up. Robinson Crusoe still counts as fiction though. Most fiction, especially good fiction, contains a fair bit fact. Either it is autobiographical in part, or the setting is accurate, or the relationships are psychologically accurate, or it is researched well. Even science fiction is often based on society's fears at the time it was written. If there was nothing non-fictional in stories, I doubt I would bother reading them.

[OrphanPip]

If Robinson Crusoe was based on Selkirk's journals, they must be the good part. I enjoyed the parts where Crusoe was building his huts, growing crops, domesticating goats and digging out canoes. I did not enjoy the beginning and the end so much when he is off the island, where it seemed more made up. Robinson Crusoe still counts as fiction though. Most fiction, especially good fiction, contains a fair bit fact. Either it is autobiographical in part, or the setting is accurate, or the relationships are psychologically accurate, or it is researched well. Even science fiction is often based on society's fears at the time it was written. If there was nothing non-fictional in stories, I doubt I would bother reading them.

I wrote my MA thesis on Defoe and always disliked Robinson Crusoe the most of all his novels. He's admittedly often quite tedious.

[Jackson Richardson]

Defoe's novels, or whatever they are, always sound so much more exciting (pirates, whores, castaways, rogues, vagabonds, royal mistresses) until you read them.