Robinson Crusoe, written by Daniel Defoe in 1719, is considered by many to be the first English "novel" and offers literature what Ian Watt describes as "a unique demonstration of the link between individualism in its many forms and the rise of the novel. Indeed, the notions of autonomy, action and self-awareness contained in literary characters, as the critic John Richetti proposes, "did not emerge as new and controversial ideas for European thought until the turn of the 17th century”; these changes are best illustrated in the emerging literary spaces of novels like Defoe's. The eponymous Robinson Crusoe fills every corner of Defoe's novel, as the reader perceives his physical feelings, thoughts, and fantasies from every angle, whether retrospectively mediated by Crusoe or experienced through his diary entries. Defoe generously uses the newly forged novelistic space to explore, through Crusoe, more generally the notion of personal identity and a new type of "truth" through individual perceptions, addressing post-Reformation change and the rise of National state in the 16th century. , which, as Watts suggests, "decisively challenged the substantial social homogeneity of medieval Christianity." Crusoe's trajectory symbolically represents this extreme movement; from a world in which one's social order and position depended on family ties, to literal individuality on a strange island on which nothing is familiar. This isolation, in a newly emerging literary form, allows Defoe to explore the "inner moral being" of his character and to announce individuality as a valid means through which to perceive and understand one's environment, while by tracing new ways of successfully orienting oneself in the absence of any business, or even social order. Crusoe's island thus becomes a hyperbolic metaphor advocating self-examination and the perception of oneself as different in reaction to the "social homogeneity" of the past and the recourse to old thinking for orientation. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayThe early 18th-century novel marked a shift from the Enlightenment standards dichotomy between fiction and fact, which, as Richetti writes, “established as strictly separate.” One of the often-discussed facets of the first novel is its presentation of "realism" in the sense of everyday life, and it is a facet that may seem, at first glance, to place the novel firmly on the side of the "factual", at a distance from the "gloriously and deliberately 'unreal' world of medieval romance". In a conventional sense, Robinson Crusoe is not factual; it was marketed as a real-life tale of a castaway, but turned out to be fictional in the sense that it was a product of Defoe's imagination. However, as Richetti describes the first novel, he suggests that it presents an interaction "between a world of fact and the heroic individuals who give it shape and meaning", highlighting the point where reality and fiction intersect in Defoe's novel . If Defoe is only trying to create a sense of individual encounter with the world, then everything Crusoe says in the novel is true to his own perception, because he has no discernible reason to lie or invent. Thus, a new type of truth or "fact" is favored, in which the individual's perceptions can be objectively fictional, both in the sense that he is a fictional character within a work of fiction, and fictional within its universe, while being true by its fictional character. cleanperceptions and therefore valid. As an example, we see Crusoe begin to linguistically domesticate his environment at the beginning of the novel: "So I placed him in my new cave, which in my imagination I called my kitchen."[50]Obviously, the " "cave", as we are clearly told, is not a kitchen in the conventional sense, and Crusoe has simply appropriated the domestic language familiar to him. However, the novel does not find this label non-factual and accepts that these are the terms on which Crusoe sees his world. Furthermore, it has been stated elsewhere that fantasy and imagination reign in the novel: "I obeyed blindly the dictates of my fantasy rather than those of my reason".[34] Although "blindly" suggests the folly of obeying fantasy, the novel's denouement rewards such pursuit of individual fantasy and presents an individual view of the world as an important one. Michael Seidel highlights this distinction by writing that "Crusoe does not write an encyclopedia on his island, but he makes one", highlighting the individuality of his perceptions in the novel, suggesting that he does not "write" not objective facts, but rather subjective 'executes', showing us things as he sees them. Once we begin to see Crusoe's conflations of his imagination and the objective world as an acceptable form of truth or fact, even his dreams and visions become blurred in this mixture. Seidel, writing about the "varieties of fictional experiences" in Robinson Crusoe, argues that "Crusoe's imagination generates many more fictions than that which he experiences", and I would go further to suggest that the " "fictions" generated by Crusoe himself [in the form of dreams or imaginations] are barely distinguishable from his recorded "real" events and, as such, are intended to be treated with equal validity. I thought I was sitting on the ground outside my wall. . where I was sitting when the storm blew after the earthquake, and I saw a man come down from a great black cloud, in a bright, luminous flame of fire upon the ground […] his face was terrible, impossible to describe in words; when he stepped on the ground with his feet, I believed that the earth was shaking, just as it had done before the earthquake, and that all the air seemed to my apprehension, as if it had been filled with flashes of fire. »[70]To begin with, Crusoe's dream is not particularly fantastical and is firmly set in places that he and the reader already know, "outside my wall", while mimicking his real world. experiences with the earth shaking "as it had before the earthquake". Furthermore, the language he uses in this particular passage is no different from that he uses when writing about ordinary events in his diary, with the phrase "impossible to describe in words" recurring in many different forms throughout the novel. – in the case of the theft of his corn, for example, the effect of which he describes as “impossible to imagine”.[93] It is barely perceptible to the reader that it is a mere vision or dream, and therefore receives the same level of acceptance as truth as any other real "event." in the novel. Ultimately, the type of "reality" Defoe creates is one in which everything subjectively perceived by an individual is true and factual, simply by virtue of being experienced. While I have demonstrated the intersections of reality and fiction as they lie within individual experience, the constitution of the individual and the definition of "self" have not yet been anatomized; an act that the novel actually attempts to carry out itself. Robinson Crusoe was written ina time when there was a growing interest in feeling and sensitivity, resulting in mediations on the functioning of the mind, body and emotions, illustrated in one case with the Characteristics of Men, the Manners of the Count of Shaftesbury, Opinions, Time: "Begin then with this proof: 'That having the natural affections (such as are founded on love, complacency, good will, and sympathy with the genus or species) c 'is having the main means and species'. Power of Personal Enjoyment”[.]In an almost pseudo-scientific manner, Shaftesbury separates things like “natural affections,” “love” and “good will” in order to explain their contribution to the constitution of “personal enjoyment”. He continues to rely, for validity, on assumptions of people's experience, asserting for example "that most people admit that the latter satisfactions are the greatest", assuming that general experience will speak in favor of its truth. Robinson Crusoe does a somewhat similar thing in attempting to anatomize the "self" and all its faculties, but rather than relying on experience in general, he presents a defining example of Crusoe's personal identity. We are confronted with a number of different workings of Crusoe, with 'body', 'mind', 'heart', 'reason' and 'conscience' all at play as part of himself . The expressions “my self” and “no body,” now eluded in colloquial English, also contribute to the emphasis on the “me” and “body” explored by the novel. All of these faculties and "parts" of Crusoe seem to function to produce different effects on Crusoe, as Defoe compartmentalizes them in a manner similar to Shaftesbury: "I was so amazed at the thing itself, never having felt that nor discussed. with anyone who had done it, I was like a dead person or a stunned person; and the movement of the earth made my stomach ache, as if it were being thrown into the sea; but the sound of the falling rock woke me up, so to speak, and brought me out of the state of stupor in which I was. , filled me with horror, and then I thought of nothing but the hill falling on my tent and all my household goods, and burying them with one blow; and it sunk my soul deep within me. finally, his “soul” sinks into him, in a literary spectacle of detailed interiority. Each of these things works separately, as Crusoe's isolation forces him to anatomize every type of feeling or drive he perceives in himself, and often early in the novel we see them working against each other : appeals of my reason and calmer judgment to return home, and yet I had no power to do so. I don't know what to call it, and I won't insist, that it is a secret decree that compels us to become instruments of our own destruction. »[.][13]Here Crusoe sees his motivation to travel as a force acting outside his body, a secret "supreme decree" over which he has no power or control. This is just one example of moments in which Crusoe displays difficulty perceiving himself as a complete individual, maintaining the belief that he has no control over his own impulses and desires. However, as mentioned above, Crusoe symbolically traces the shift from what Watt calls the old thinking of the "body politic" to individualism, and with this shift comes a more complete and unified conception of self as Crusoe directs a new order for itself. This change is depicted as somewhat inevitable, as we see that even before Crusoe washes up on his island, he harbors feelings of isolation: "I had no one else to be with.