鲁滨逊漂流记分析
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2021年01月17日 14:49
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爆笑谷-阳光的味道
1. Character List
1.1 Robinson Crusoe
The novel’s protagonist and narrator. Crusoe begins the novel as a young
middle-class man in York in search of a career. He father recommends the
law, but Crusoe yearns for a life at sea, and his subsequent rebellion and
decision
to
become
a
merchant
is
the
starting
point
for
the
whole
adventure that follows. His vague but recurring feelings of guilt over his
disobedience color the first part of the first half of the story and show us
how
deep
Crusoe’s
religious
fear
is
.
Crusoe
is
steady
and
plodding
in
everything
he
does,
and
his
perseverance
ensures
his
survival
through
storms, enslavement, and a twenty-eight-year isolation on a desert island.
1.2 Friday
A
twenty-six-year-old
Caribbean
native
and
cannibal,
Friday
becomes
Crusoe’s
servant
after
Crusoe saves his
life
when
Friday
is
about
to
be
eaten by other cannibals. Friday never appears to resist or resent his new
servitude, and he may sincerely view it as appropriate compensation for
having
his
life
saved.
But
what
ever
Friday’s
response
may
be,
his
servitude has become a symbol of imperialist oppression throughout the
modern
world.
Friday’s
overall
charisma
works
against
the
emotional
deadness that many readers find in Crusoe.
1.3 The widow
Appearing briefly, but on two separate occasions in the novel, the widow
keeps Crusoe’s 200 pounds safe in England throughout all his thirty
-five
years
of
journeying.
She
returns
it
loyally
to
Crusoe
upon
his
return to
England
and,
like
the
Portuguese
captain
and
Friday,
reminds
us
of the
goodwill and trustworthiness of which humans can be capable, whether
European or not
2. Diction
As
an
individual
personality,
Crusoe
is
rather
dull.
His
precise
and
deadpan style of narration works well for recounting the process of canoe
building, but it tends to drain the excitement from events that should be
thrilling. Action-packed scenes like the conquest of the cannibals become
quite
humdrum
when
Crusoe
narrates
them,
giving
us
a
detailed
inventory
of
the
cannibals
in
list
form,
for
example.
His
insistence
on
dating events makes sense to a point, but it ultimately ends up seeming
obsessive and irrelevant when he tells us the date on which he grinds his
tools but neglects to tell us the date of a very important event like meeting
Friday. Perhaps his impulse to record facts carefully is not a survival skill,
but an irritating sign of his neurosis.
3.
Symbols
Symbols
are
objects,
characters,
figures,
or
colors
used
to
represent
abstract ideas or concepts.
3.1 The Footprint
Crusoe’s
shock
ing
discovery
of
a
single
footprint
on
the
sand
in
Chapter XVIII is one of the most famous
moments in the novel, and it
symbolizes
our
hero’s
conflicted
feelings
about
human
companionship.
Crusoe has earlier confessed how much he misses companionship, yet the
evidence of a man on his island sends him into a panic.
This instinctively negative and fearful attitude toward others makes us
consider
the
possibility
that
Crusoe
may
not
want
to
return
to
human
society after all, and that the isolation he is experiencing may actually be
his ideal state.
3.2 The Cross
“lose
[his]
reckoning
of
time”
in
Chapter
VII,
Crusoe
marks
the
passing of days “with [his] knife upon a large post, in capital letters, and
making it into a great cross . . . set[s] it up on the shore where [he] first
landed. . . .”