What makes robinson crusoe a classic

The novel has spawned many imitations in film, television and radio. A pantomime adaptation of Robinson Crusoe was first staged at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in and a version of this seasonal entertainment still exists today.

In Treasure Island , author Robert Louis Stevenson parodies Crusoe with the character of Ben Gunn , a friendly castaway who was marooned for many years, has a wild appearance, dresses entirely in goat skin and constantly talks about providence.

Robin Crusoe, U. Variations on the theme include the Miss Robin Crusoe , with a female castaway and a female Friday and the film Robinson Crusoe on Mars , starring Paul Mantee , with an alien Friday portrayed by Victor Lundin.

All these various takes on Robinson Crusoe inevitably reflect on the brilliance of the original. Robinson Crusoe. May For one thing, it is often cited as the first English novel though the French and Spanish had produced novels over a century earlier and as such it is bound to be somewhat important in literary history. Suspicions are that most readers have been exposed to Defoe's story in only abridged and illustrated editions, in which the above problems are smoothed out or expunged altogether, or through the many literary or cinematic take-offs on the story.

Perhaps most people haven't actually read Defoe—they only think they have. I can't see many folks of the modern era struggling through the awful original text and coming away enthralled. A reader taking up the actual book today may not realize Crusoe's sojourn on the deserted island is intended by Defoe to be only the greatest among many adventures his protagonist experiences in his world travels. In Robinson Crusoe, before he is stranded on the island, Crusoe has already embarked on trading ventures around Africa, been captured and enslaved by a Moorish pirate, escaped on a small boat in the Atlantic, and become a plantation owner in Brazil.

After rescue from his island ordeal, he becomes engaged in adventures in France of all places, where he is attacked by wolves.

In the sequel, The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, our supposed hero revisits the island to set right the community he had established there but spends most of his time sailing around the eastern world, fighting pirates and authorities alike, travelling through Asian countries to ridicule their cultures and destroy their non-Christian religions—and making profit wherever he can, including by selling opium to the Chinese.

But it is the island story that dominates the original novel and our collective memory of Robinson Crusoe. The character sets out to Africa on behalf of a Brazilian consortium of plantation owners to get slaves but a series of misadventures lands him, the only survivor of a shipwreck, on a shore somewhere off the northeast coast of South America. The rest of the story about how he establishes shelter, finds food, fends off cannibals and marauding Spaniards, and befriends a supposed savage he names Friday and requires to call him "Master" in return is well known.

What may not be so well known is how drawn out this part of the book is with excruciating detail. In storytelling terms, this is pure gold. The pioneer novelist understood the importance of attaching memorably concrete images to his narrative and its characters. Friday and his famous footstep in the sand, one of the four great moments in English fiction, according to Robert Louis Stevenson; Crusoe with his parrot and his umbrella: these have become part of English myth.

Defoe, like Cervantes, also opts to give his protagonist a sidekick. Friday is to Crusoe what Sancho Panza is to Quixote. He was the complete professional, dipped in ink. Throughout his life, he produced pamphlets, squibs, narrative verse and ghosted ephemera he is said to have used almost pen names.