Robinson Crusoe and No Man's Land

Everett Zimmerman, University of California, Santa Barbara

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and its sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, are substantially concerned with questions about the order appropriately obtaining outside definitively established social or political domains.1 Crusoe's often-analyzed departure from his father's house is a rejection of the social order into which he was born. His predilection for the sea represents his fascination with a liminal state in which the seemingly rigorous shipboard order required for safety and successful commerce is persistently threatened by nature, by the fragility of social bonds far from home, and by an ambiguous political order. Over the course of his lengthy narration, Crusoe frequently presents questions of order as personal-that is, as questions of mental stability and household tidiness. But he also turns these private concerns into questions about a larger order. Having made a home for himself on an American island, he implicitly examines the island's political status through his assumption that the island is his property and through his ruminations upon his relations to the cannibals, Friday, and the Spaniards. His return to the island in The Farther Adventures is motivated in part by a guilt-ridden sense of having irresponsibly left the island in a condition that is likely to have promoted unresolvable conflict. On his return, he wishes to institute a less tenuous civil order there.