Defoe's blurry imagination
Daniel Defoe has a different style of writing when it comes to being descriptive. He writes as though you have a "third person" view of the main character, all of the time and what Crusoe sees, you also will see. This bothered me a little bit, as in the introduction of the island where Crusoe is shipwrecked, Defoe wasn't very descriptive at all with the islands qualities or features. He does mention that Crusoe hits his head in the water against a large rock that was roughly one mile off-shore, but when it comes to the point when Crusoe ventures about the island to see what he's dealing with, the best description early on is, "I was in an island environ'd every way with the sea, no land to be seen, except some rocks which lay a great way off, and two small islands less than this" (Defoe, Robinson Crusoe 43).
Although when Defoe describes the island so enigmatically, it really gives the island a different mood. It feels as though the island could be more mysterious because the reader knows so much less about it. The feel of mystery as I read about his first few nights, not knowing whether there were predators on the island or not, or how the character felt about his new home gives the book a different spin on surviving an unknown environment.
Although when Defoe describes the island so enigmatically, it really gives the island a different mood. It feels as though the island could be more mysterious because the reader knows so much less about it. The feel of mystery as I read about his first few nights, not knowing whether there were predators on the island or not, or how the character felt about his new home gives the book a different spin on surviving an unknown environment.
Because of Defoe's cloudiness of everything that he talks about, it could be over the top to be boring without Defoe even meaning to be. As a reader I find that if you go into the vast information of someones journal of what they do on the island on a day-to-day basis, I think it should either be no problem to summarize parts of the journal, or talk more about simple, little things like the location of a valley. Instead of just saying that a valley is pleasant and then talking about the grapes he finds, Defoe could really go into the fact that the field was covered in grass and had many types of plants growing including some grapevines. Although getting through the first year is long and sometimes tedious, it doesn't mean that the whole book was a long and boring survival story. As you read on and on through Crusoe's adventures, you'll get more and more "fish-hooked" into the page flipping experience.
