(Untitled)

[nathskywalker]

I finally started my term paper! I'm about 400 words into it which is really great considering that this baby needs to be 8,000 words long. Oh well, at least I started it. Another problem is that even as I formulate the thesis I'm seeing that what I want to do is all over the place as I want to examine fictionality and colonial myth. But I'll

Comments

[nathskywalker]

Ian Watt observes that Robinson Crusoe is one of “the great myths of our civilization,” (Watt 288) alongside such characters as Don Quijote, Faust and Don Juan. But Robinson is also the one who has received the most "responses" (all those Robinsonades that are pretty much copycat stories of people on stranded islands, modern day interpretations). I'm using a postcolonial response to Robinson, J.M. Coetzee's Foe, to work on the myth and fictionality aspect. In Foe (which is a crazy metafictional novel I don't completely understand), the story is narrated by a female castaway who encounters Robinson and Friday and spends a year with them. Unlike in the original, this Robinson is not the posterboy for Protestant work ethic but just sort of sits around for 15+ years instead of constructing the great colony Defoe's Robinson constructs. And Friday's lack of an own voice in Defoe's novel is explained away by him having literally no voice as his his tongue was cut out at some point in his life.

Female castaway is the only one with any creativity / willingness to do anything to improve life on the island but Robinson constantly shoots her down and eventually they are rescued. One of my favorite lines (that I'm currently working on in the term paper) is: "Cruso rescued will be a deep disappointment to the world; the idea of a Cruso on his island is a better thing than the true thing than the true Cruso tight-lipped and sullen in an alien England.” Robinson doesn't make it to England and female castaway, who sort of inherits Friday, decides to find someone to write down a true account of what happened on the island, settling on a gentleman named Foe (a fictionalized version of Daniel Defoe himself). From then on you get some really cool passages on her musing about fiction and being made into fiction as she starts to reconsider some of her decisions including why Robinson should be the hero of her story and not her and if some alterations to the story have to be made if anyone's supposed to read it because life on the island is boring as hell.

So I'm arguing that especially when read with Foe, Robinson Crusoe is a perfect example of colonial myth, even an instruction manual to starting a colony, how Foe shows the transformation from one kind of account to the other and (maybe) that Foe is probably a better representation of what island life was really like (probably not).

That got really long, sorry.

[shayna611]

I liked the long answer! It was really interesting.