After his voyage back home, Crusoe finds that when he “came to England, [he]
was as perfect a Stranger to all the World, as if [he] had never been known there”
(Defoe 278, original emphasis) and he had “nothing to relieve, or assist, and that little Money [he] had, would not do much” (Defoe 279) for him to settle in England. At this moment, Crusoe seemed to be a cultural other to England and did not know what to do to sustain his life but he soon realized that “money” would be the answer to this
question. Money is a thing without value to Crusoe at the first stage. When Crusoe serendipitously found “Thirty six Pounds value in Money, some European Coin, some Brasil, some Pieces of Eight, some Gold, some Silver” on his ship, he said that “O Drug! What art thou good for, Thou art not worth to me, no not the taking off the Ground, one of those Knives is worth all this Heap, I have no Manner of use for thee, e’en remain where thou art, and go to the Bottom as a Creature whose Life is not worth saving” (Defoe 57, original emphasis). The same thing happened when Crusoe found money on the shipwreck nearby his island and he said that “for as to the Money, I had no manner of occasion for it: ‘Twas to me as the Dirt under my Feet; and I
would have given it all for three of four pair of English Shoes and Stockings, which were Things I greatly wanted” (Defoe 193, original emphasis). In these two scenes, Crusoe detests money because of its valuelessness to his life on the island at that moment but, in both scenes, Crusoe “upon Second Thoughts, [he] took [money] away, and wrapping all this in a Piece of Canvas” and “lugg’d this Money home” (Defoe 57, 193). These two scenes show that Crusoe always sees things with a merchant’s mind and this merchant’s mind is relevant to his individuality. Also, Crusoe holds the strong hope that he will have the chance to go back to England. After his way home,
Crusoe’s merchant’s mind recognizes that money is now the most valuable thing to him. Thus, Crusoe “resolv’d to go to Lisbon, and see if [he] might not come by some Information of the State of [his] Plantation in the Brasils” (Defoe 279, original emphasis). When Crusoe “found all [his] Wealth about ” him in Brazil, he said that:
I was now Master, all on a Sudden, of above 5000 l. Sterling in Money, and had an Estate, as I might well call it, in the Brasils, of above a thousand Pounds a Year, as sure as an Estate of Lands in England: And in a Word, I was in a Condition which I scarce knew how to understand, or how to compose my self, for the Enjoyment of it (Defoe 285, original emphasis).
Crusoe’s exaltation is a strange thing compared with the beginning of the novel because Crusoe now is in a status, a middle-station merchant, which he originally had the least inclination for. However, it is too easy to say that Crusoe is totally satisfied with his life in England because he “could not resist the strong Inclination [he] had to see [his] Island ” (Defoe 304).
When Crusoe took his nephew’s ship back to his previous island, he:
[… ] stay’d about 20 Days, left [his people] Supplies, of all necessary things, and particularly of Arms, Power, Shot, Cloaths, Tools, and two Workmen, which [he] bought from England. [… ] Besides this, [Crusoe] shar’d the Island into Parts with ‘em, reserv’d to [him] self the Property of the whole, but gave them such Parts respectively as they agreed on; and having settled all things with them, and engaged them not to leave the Place, I left them there (Defoe 305-6, original emphasis).
The importance of Crusoe’s return to his island lies in his image as a benefactor, to supply habitants on the island with necessities, and a king, to share his ownership of land to the people on the island. Obviously, Crusoe’s enjoyment comes from being not only a successful middle-station merchant in England but also an almighty king on his island at the third stage. In short, Crusoe still lives with double identities, being a merchant and a king, at this stage. What we can find behind Crusoe’s double identities is his individuality. Like the first two stages, Crusoe’s behavior is on the basis of his individuality. Crusoe returns to his land may, to some extent, seem to suggest that his concerns are not arbitrary to his individuality only. However, I will prefer to say that this return to the island aims not mainly to improve the life of people on it but to portray Crusoe as king who possesses everything on the island. Thus, to take care of these people is a compulsory duty for our king Crusoe. By practicing this duty, Crusoe’s individuality can be clear to his readers.
Conclusion
Crusoe’s exile to the island is a turning point in his life. Crusoe’s exile “derives its power from serving as a commentary not only on the place to which one is exiled but also on the place from which one is exiled” (Seidel 364 original emphasis).
Besides, exiled “heroes tend to remain apart from their tainted home until both they and the powers they represent are ready to retake it. In the interim, exiles removed from their land spend their time both trying to replace it and trying, paradoxically, to forget as best they can the trauma that necessitated their original displacement”
(Seidel 364). In other words, Crusoe’s exile to his island is, at first, a way to avoid being traumatized by his father’s wish, which is to become a middle-state merchant, but to become a man that he wants to be. However, this exile will come to its end when Crusoe is powerful and ready or, in other words, to find his individuality to retake this trauma in Seidel’s words. In fact, it is this trauma that makes Crusoe live with double identities while he is exiled to the island and this could be seen from his different roles as a would-be traveler, an eager entrepreneur dealing in slaves and finally a property-owner of moderate wealth on his island and in England. All these roles will not appear singularly at each stage. At the first stage, Crusoe is a would-be traveler but he is also a property-owner of moderate wealth after he knows how to farm and domesticate animals. At the second stage, Crusoe acts both like a traveler and an entrepreneur in the sense of his desire to go back to England and his
well-established business on the island. At the third stage, Crusoe is a moderate property owner in the light of his profitable plantation in Brazil but he is also anxious to become a traveler to visit his island again. No matter Crusoe at which stage is, he always lives with double identities in the sense of his relationship between England and his island. What remains unchanged at three stages is the presentation of Crusoe’s individuality. Even though Crusoe’s identity may change regarding different situations,
all these changes symbolize his various needs for the practices of his individuality. In short, this book not only shows us how Crusoe lives with his double identities but also tells us how Crusoe carries out his individuality throughout his exile and his return, which is also the main concern of novel writing.
Compared with Gulliver ’s experience of identity crisis, Crusoe’s identity problem is not really a kind of crisis because he is aware of his identity at each stage even though this identity oscillates on different occasions. Meanwhile, Gulliver ’s identity keeps being problematized by the cultures he confronts and this makes him become uncertain about his identity. The cause of this difference between the two is that Gulliver always tries hard to fit in the cultures with an intention to improve English society as his final mission while Crusoe acts perfectly as an explorer with a very initial and crucial desire in those voyages to find out and to practice his
individual desires, namely individuality. If Crusoe’s only concern is to practice and to search for his individuality in his voyages, he cares nothing about the cultures he confronts but his individual desire instead. Thus, even though both Gulliver and Crusoe carry out those voyages, no matter willingly or unwillingly, they bear different thoughts in their mind. The separate purpose is exactly the main reason that makes Gulliver and Crusoe stand in a respective situation concerning their identity problems.
Conclusion
New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its
neighbourhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost.
Lost, not only in the city, but with himself as well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets [… ]. The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it
impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was the essence (Auster 3-4, my emphasis).
At the beginning of City of Glass, which is the first episode of Auster ’s The New York Trilogy, we catch Quinn in his process of becoming a traveler and the risk for him to become a traveler. Quinn is not the only traveler who needs to face this risk, which is the feeling of being lost in the place and in the self, but all the travelers carry it. The risk itself refers both to travelers’ physical and mental loss in the space.
Besides, the “mutual penetration and their consequent unfolding” of travelers’
physical and mental loss is “taken as the matrix of culture” (Islam 7). Both Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe are books about the traveler ’s
experience of being lost in both their motherland and foreign places. Their experience of being lost is, as Islam suggests, a matrix of culture in eighteenth-century England.
In so far as the culture of eighteenth-century England is concerned, it is important to understand how the traveler’s experience of being lost is presented in both books.
Gulliver’s Travels “represents Gulliver ’s wanderings among alternative ways of life in the guise of voyages to different lands. He has moved away from real voyages to imaginary ones, from concrete existence to fantasy” (Nichols 1161). It is a brilliant insight indeed to see that Gulliver’s fo ur voyages are his mental wanderings. However,
Nichols’s words intend not to deny that Gulliver’s four voyages are physical
wanderings since they are practiced in a physical way even though these islands can never be physically real. Gulliver ’s mental wandering is his experience of being mentally lost in his four voyages. Besides, once “the soul that has no fixed goals loses itself; for as they say, to be everywhere is to be nowhere” (Montaigne 21). Gulliver’s being physically lost is, so to speak, based on his being mentally lost, which is his failure of keeping on trying to fit himself into the cultures of different countries in his four voyages. In his first two voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, Gulliver’s being mentally lost is ascribed to his physical cultural otherness but his spiritual cultural otherness turns out to be the main reason for his being mentally lost in his last two voyages to Laputa and Houyhnhnms. No matter whether Gulliver’s cultural otherness is in relation to his physical or spiritual superiority or inferiority, he is inevitably a cultural other in the eyes of those visited peoples and, even, in the eyes of his
countrymen at the end of the book. In short, Gulliver’s physical and mental feelings of being lost in his four voyages are the results of his cultural otherness.
If Gulliver’s physical and mental feelings of being lost are the results of his cultural otherness and his cultural otherness comes from his failure to fit into the various societies, Crusoe’s physical and mental feelings of being lost are about his double identities, which are incurred in the light of Crusoe’s desire to get away from the society he lives in at that moment and his inseparable relation with the old world, namely England, at the three stages. At his first two stages, Crusoe’s unintentional exile is out of his desire to see the world and to get away from England with the
intention to be free from his father’s wish in which to become a middle-station person.
However, this unintentional exile does not get Crusoe too far away from his father ’s wish or his motherland in two perspectives: Crusoe’s original desire to go to sea and his ways of life on the island. Crusoe’s desire to see the world is the reason to bring
about his first time misfortune to become a slave to a Moor and this desire tells us Crusoe’s eagerness to try not to be in thrall to his father’s wish and the pressure from the old world. However, Crusoe’s second misfortune on the sea is because of his mercenary mind. On the behest of his Brazilian neighbors, Crusoe leads the ship with the intention to take some slaves to help his and his neighbor’s plantations and it is this mercenary intention causes Crusoe’s exile to the island. In other words, Crusoe’s first desire to see the world is problematized by his merchant ’s mind also. Crusoe’s ways of life on the island are the practices of a middle-station merchant in the ways of salvaging the goods on the wrecked ship and using them to maintain his subsistence on the island. The salvage of the ship not only enables Crusoe to live on the island but also wins him a chance to go back to England by saving the life of the English captain, who is the victim of the mutineers on his ship. These two, problematized desire and ways of life on the island, explain Crusoe’s physical and mental feelings of being lost by means of his physical exile to an unfamiliar place and his mental
pseudo-estrangement from the old world. At the last stage, Crusoe becomes a
well-to-do middle-station person but he can not take his island out of his head and he finally carries out this inclination by sailing with his nephew back to his island.
Crusoe’s inclination to go back to his exiled island is a reflection of his being mentally lost because it signifies his personal individuality, which is not quite the same as his father’s wish. However, throughout his exile and return both to England and his island, his individuality is always the main concern in the book. No matter what Crusoe does, everything is done on the basis of his individual desire, namely, his individuality. In short, Crusoe’s physical and mental feelings of being lost are
different stories compared with Gulliver ’s case but their experiences can be read as a way to interpret the culture of eighteenth-century England.
Eighteenth-century England, as I have said in chapter one, is a time of
ambivalence. This ambivalence is about the possibility to change. That is, the chance for social mobility. However, this possibility and chance promise no success or failure but a way for people to demonstrate their individuality. In Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe, both Gulliver and Crusoe have their free will to express and practice their individuality in the appropriate time by claiming that they have particular predilection to see the world. Gulliver and Crusoe are typical
eighteenth-century Englishmen because they are in a condition of making themselves be heard by others. However, even though Gulliver and Crusoe indeed can have their own voices to articulate their individual desires, their stories have a diametrically opposite ending. In Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver ends up with a tragic situation as a misanthrope since he can not really fit him into any societies and, especially, find a way to improve the English society with the knowledge he learns from the
Houyhnhnms after his four voyages. This tragic ending is predictable because of its genre, satire. Satire is a genre which purposes to ridicule the follies and to improve the communal welfare rather than to fulfill individual desires. In Gulliver Travels, the first three voyages tell us the contradiction between Gulliver ’s individuality and other cultures. Here, Gulliver’s individuality is about his nature, Englishness. Thus, when we say Gulliver can hardly fit in other cultures, we mean that his Englishness not his individual desire cannot find a place in that different culture. As for the last voyage to the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver’s nature is challenged with the intention to let his readers understand that England is not as good as they believe and there must be something they can do to improve the social systems of England. In short, Gulliver ’s story is a satire in the sense of ridiculing the follies in other cultures and England and proposing a better life to the readers. Unlike Gulliver, Crusoe’s story has a happy ending because he lives in a self-content middle-station life even though this kind of life is partially incomplete regarding the entanglement of individuality and society. The individuality
here refers not to the same thing as it is in Gulliver’s Travels. Crusoe’s individuality largely emphasizes his individual desire and has not much to do with the communal welfare. This can be seen at each stage of his story because whatever Crusoe or other people do, everything must be done with Crusoe’s consent. This is also not out of our surprise since the novel is a genre focusing on individual desire. Thus, reading
through the whole book, we can give a definitive answer to say that Robinson Crusoe is a novel. Gulliver and Crusoe’s free will and the opposit e ending in the two books exalt the importance of individuality, which eighteenth-century Englishmen hold dear, and the presentation of individuality is relevant to their respective genre. More than this, the two books also represent the social reality in eighteenth-century England that not everyone can be so fortunate to be successful when they have a chance to change their life. In other words, the possibility and chance to change enliven
eighteenth-century English society in the way of introducing different kinds of life styles to its people. People can imitate those life styles according to their individual propensity and ability. By doing so, social mobility emerges and the rigid class boundary dissolves.
Another important aspect of the two travel narratives is that the two narratives single out the importance of travel in eighteenth-century England. Travel in
eighteenth-century England aims to educate and to explore, as I have said in chapter
eighteenth-century England aims to educate and to explore, as I have said in chapter