Robinson Crusoe

• Rex Butler

After twenty-eight years and some three-hundred pages, Robinson Crusoe finally gets off the island. It’s a moment for which Daniel Defoe reserves his happiest, sunniest, most straightforward prose—and, remember, throughout the whole long lonely episode Robinson always believes he will be rescued, never feels he is alone, is always convinced his sufferings have some higher meaning thanks to his newly discovered faith in God:

When I took leave of this island, I carry’d on board for reliques the great goat’s-skin cap I made, my umbrella, and my parrot; also I forgot not to take the money I formerly mention’d, which had lain by me so long useless, that it was grown rusty, or tarnish’d, and could hardly pass for silver, till it had been a little rubb’d, and handled, as also the money I found in the wreck of the Spanish ship.

And thus I left the island, the nineteenth of December, as I found by the ship’s account, in the year 1686, after I had been upon it eight and twenty years, two months, and 19 days.