Novelists, too, have responded to and indeed rewritten Robinson Crusoe. Among the most famous such rewritings of Defoe’s narrative are Swiss Family Robinson (1812) by Johann Wyss and, much more recently, Foe (1986) by J. M. Coetzee, the South African writer and winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature. Other works that have been discussed as reworkings of Robinson Crusoe include Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) and two novels—not only Lord of the Flies (1954) but also Pincher Martin (1956)— by another Nobel Prize winner (in 1986), William Golding. Indeed Robinson Crusoe has been reimagined so many times in print that all of these works taken together constitute a distinct literary genre known as the Robinsonade.

Clearly, then, Defoe’s narrative struck a deep nerve in Western culture. The book was very popular when it was first published, and Defoe sought to take advantage of that success by writing two sequels: Robinson Crusoe’s Farther Adventures (1719) and Serious Reflections (1720). (The version of the novel given in this edition is not based on any of the editions published in Defoe’s lifetime. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized, and chapters have been created and chapter titles inserted. Such chapter breaks and titles have been used before but they are not Defoe’s.) The story, moreover, has endured in the popular imagination. Ian Watt argues that the Crusoe story (like the stories of Faust, Don Quixote, and Don Juan) is a ‘‘myth of modern individualism’’; that is, the novel embodies one of the stories that people in Western culture use as a key to who and what we are, so much so that the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in Émile (1762), his treatise on education, declares that Robinson Crusoe will be the first book, and for a long time the only book, read by his representative, imaginary student, Émile.

Robinson Crusoe’s enduring resonance may be explained in many ways; indeed, there are almost as many explanations as there are interpreters of this text. Many have read the book simply as a great adventure, the story of an ordinary man who ventures into the great world, suffers terribly but endures and indeed thrives on his island, and returns to England a successful man. The dark side of this view is that Robinson Crusoe embodies the very image of Western imperialism, an impulse and a process that led a few countries in Western Europe to colonize or otherwise subdue much of Latin America, Africa, and Asia from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Crusoe styles himself ‘‘a king’’ with ‘‘an undoubted right of dominion’’ (page 243) on his island, and the great critic Edward Said points out that it is hardly accidental that the book, often cited as the first great realist novel, features a European who establishes a kingdom, and with it mastery of racial and ethnic others, on a faraway, non-European island.

Other readers have focused on a very different element in the narrative: religion. Defoe’s preface recommends the work for its ‘‘religious application of events’’ and its justification of ‘‘the wisdom of Providence’’ (page 3), and from the eighteenth century onward, readers have celebrated the book for its piety. Twentieth-century critics analyzed the book’s debt to spiritual biography and autobiography, and discussed Robinson Crusoe’s kinship with the great allegory of Christian man’s journey to salvation, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). And contemporary American readers can hardly help noticing that Crusoe—when he prays ‘‘with a true Scripture view of hope founded on the encouragement of the Word of God’’ and reflects upon the biblical passage ‘‘Call on Me, and I will deliver you’’ (page 98)—is ‘‘born again’’ on the island.

There are many other ways of thinking about Defoe’s novel, including, to name only the most striking arguments: Crusoe as economic man, Crusoe’s island as a prison, and Crusoe as a scientist. It has also been argued that the narrative as a fact-based account tells us something definitive about the nature of the novel itself. In what follows, however, I want to focus on three aspects of Robinson Crusoe that I think go a long way toward explaining why and how the book has worked so powerfully on readers and on other artists over the last three hundred years, and, especially, why and how it continues to have such force in our own time. These three elements of the novel are isolation, technique, and race, and I will discuss these issues by looking at the reception accorded Defoe’s novel, principally in works for the screen.

Robinson Crusoe is a story about loneliness. The hero of the book, the original title page informs us, lives on his island for twenty-eight years. It is only two-thirds of the way through the book that Crusoe is finally joined on the island by another human being, Friday. Crusoe emphasizes the pain of isolation when he draws up the balance sheet that summarizes his situation on the island. The first three items on the ‘‘Evil’’ side of the ledger all have to do with his loneliness: ‘‘I am cast upon a horrible desolate island’’; ‘‘I am singled out and separated, as it were, from all the world’’; and ‘‘I am divided from mankind, a solitaire, one banished from human society’’ (pages 67-68). At the end of his second year on the island, Crusoe gives thanks for ‘‘the many wonderful mercies’’ that have been bestowed upon him by God but at the same time he makes it clear that his ‘‘solitary state’’ is a continuing source of suffering (page 114), and he later observes that the period after he saves Friday’s life is ‘‘the pleasantest year of all the life I led in this place’’ (page 216).

It must be said that a good deal less attention is paid in the novel to the psychic toll of loneliness than a reader in a world shaped by the rise of psychology might expect. Virginia Woolf once observed that one of the most surprising features of the book is that in it ‘‘there is no solitude and no soul.’’ But readers have often emphasized the book’s representation of isolation and the desolation that accompanies it; in the eighteenth century the critic James Beattie observed that the book ‘‘fixes in the mind a lively idea of the horrors of solitude,’’ and Poe saw it as offering an unprecedented look at ‘‘the idea of a man in perfect isolation.’’ Many twentieth-century responses to the book emphasize Crusoe’s loneliness and its terrible cost. In two of the best films based on the novel, the hero essentially goes mad because of his ‘‘solitary state.’’ Buñuel reports in his memoirs that what interested him about the story was Crusoe’s solitude, and his film highlights the hero’s psychic torment. In one sequence (not based on anything in the novel), Crusoe (Dan O’Herlihy), in a drunken waking dream, hears the voices of former companions singing a song that reflects Crusoe’s own state of mind: ‘‘Down among the dead men, down among the dead men, . . . down among the dead men, let them lie.’’ When the singing suddenly stops, Crusoe looks bereft and weeps. Later, we see him running into the ocean in a frenzy, crying, ‘‘Help! Help!’’ and then talking to two insects, calling them ‘‘my little friends,’’ feeding them an ant, and relishing their eating. Similarly, in Cast Away, Chuck Noland (Hanks) tries to commit suicide and in the latter stages of his stay on the island talks to and even quarrels with ‘‘Wilson,’’ a volleyball that takes on human qualities when the impression of Noland’s bleeding hand imprints something like a human face on it. When Noland finally escapes from the island on a raft that he has constructed, he loses Wilson and is shown weeping inconsolably before apparently resigning himself to his own death by throwing his paddles overboard.

How does Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe avoid the madness that overtakes the heroes of the films by Buñuel and Zemeckis? He works, and therein lies a major key to the book’s enduring appeal. Crusoe informs the reader that he is ‘‘very seldom idle’’ (page 116); as a result of his constant labor, he, a man who ‘‘had never handled a tool’’ in his life, becomes a ‘‘master of every mechanic art’’ (page 69). He works at everything: animal husbandry, baking, architecture, farming, pottery, building boats, and making things: clothes, an umbrella, butter, cheese. More than one critic has pointed out that Crusoe’s experience recapitulates the economic history of mankind in that Crusoe, on the island, masters the skills necessary to both agriculture and industry and creates his own world of things. Woolf argues that the book, above all else, shows how ‘‘serious’’ and ‘‘beautiful’’ it is ‘‘to dig, to bake, to plant, to build.’’ Crusoe himself reflects on what he learns about the complex process of growing and making things. ‘‘’Tis a little wonderful, and what I believe very few people have thought much upon,’’ Defoe’s hero observes, ‘‘the strange multitude of little things necessary’’ for the production of ‘‘one article of bread’’ (page 119). Crusoe describes the steps necessary to producing a loaf of bread: plowing or otherwise turning the earth, sowing, building a fence to protect the crop, harvesting and threshing, milling the grain, and building an oven. After his first harvest, he sets himself the task, in ‘‘the next six months to apply myself wholly by labour and invention to furnish myself with utensils proper for the performing all the operations necessary for the making’’ of bread (page 120). Thus, in the same century in which Adam Smith, the first great theorist of capitalism, published The Wealth of Nations (1776) and in which the industrial revolution began in England, Robinson Crusoe laid out the idea of the division of labor so important both to Smith’s theory and to the industrial revolution generally. And Defoe’s readers watch admiringly as Crusoe acquires one new skill after another.

On television, the series Survivor attends to this theme. Before that series begins to focus almost entirely on group dynamics—who gets voted off, who remains— it shows participants attempting to acquire survival skills, especially those associated with finding food. Films based on Robinson Crusoe have been particularly interested in Crusoe’s struggle to master new skills. Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe is, of all the major films based on Defoe’s novel, in many ways the most faithful, and this is particularly evident in the film’s representation of Crusoe’s growing mastery of a wide range of techniques. We see him fashioning the famous umbrella and goatskin clothes, raising wheat and baking bread, building a stockade, and making his own pots. In Cast Away Noland’s progress on the island is registered chiefly by his acquisition of various skills. Early in the hero’s ordeal, he exults when he manages to build a fire (‘‘I have made fire!’’), but the overweight businessman is very inept when it comes to fishing or providing himself with shelter. After four years on the island, however, Noland expertly throws a spear to catch a fish; now remarkably slim, he meets with ease the physical challenges of life on the island. (His transformation seemingly begins when he manages to extract an aching tooth; a four-year gap in the narrative opens after Noland passes out after the painful operation.) And in the end, Noland manages to build the raft that gets him off the island and carries him to safety and home. Robinson Crusoe films, then, like readers since 1719, have responded with fascination to the novel’s description of how, by endless ‘‘experiment,’’ the hero becomes ‘‘master of my business’’ (page 107).

Another form of mastery, one that takes us to the book’s most troubling aspects, is seen in the relationship between Crusoe and Friday. Shortly after Defoe’s Crusoe rescues Friday, the basis for their dealings with each other is unmistakably established. Crusoe relates that shortly after being saved, Friday comes to him and ‘‘lays his head flat upon the ground, close to my foot, and sets my other foot upon his head’’ and makes ‘‘all the signs to me of subjection, servitude, and submission imaginable. ’’ Crusoe lets Friday know that he is ‘‘very well pleased with him’’ (pages 208-9). Crusoe also names Friday, teaches him, and converts him, and he clearly regards Friday as naturally submissive: ‘‘never man had a more faithful, loving, sincere servant than Friday was to me; without passions, sullenness, or designs, perfectly obliged and engaged’’ (page 211). Just after this assessment of Friday, Crusoe reflects at length on the ways of Providence—how God ordains different conditions and fates for different kinds of men—and the text thereby suggests that Friday and his whole race were created as natural servants of European man.

Such beliefs were, of course, part of the rationale for European imperialism, and some of Robinson Crusoe’s mythic force, at least for a long time after the book first appeared, was undoubtedly due to its presentation of a non-European, nonwhite ‘‘other’’ readily embracing ‘‘subjection, servitude, and submission’’ as his natural stance in respect to white European man. This element of the book, happily, has become its most problematic aspect for those who imitate, adapt or otherwise rework Defoe’s novel. Coetzee’s Foe raises the problem of Friday by presenting him as a man whose tongue has been cut out and whose true story, as a result, may not be told. Similarly, most of the films based on Robinson Crusoe treat Friday in such a way as to critique the racial politics of the original. Buñuel’s Crusoe at first treats Friday (Jaime Fernández) quite cruelly but the Englishman then undergoes a transformation. At one point he begs Friday to forgive him and declares, ‘‘I want you to be my friend.’’ Man Friday (1975), a British film directed by Jack Gold, represents Crusoe (Peter O’Toole) as a diseased racist and Friday (Richard Roundtree) as morally and spiritually superior to the Englishman. In the American film Crusoe (1988), directed by Caleb Deschanel, there is, strictly speaking no Friday; rather, the Crusoe (Aidan Quinn) of that film, a nineteenth-century American slave trader, has an encounter with a black man identified in the film’s credits as ‘‘the Warrior’’ (Ade Sapara). Their meeting leads to Crusoe’s moral transformation. The Warrior saves Crusoe when he falls into quicksand, and when the two quarrel over whose language they will use, Crusoe finally accepts the warrior’s meat and also uses his word for it: ‘‘jala.’’ The two establish a rough equality, and at the end of the film when the Warrior is taken captive by anthropologists, Crusoe frees him. Afterward Crusoe is seen on the ship that will take him home as clean-shaven, clear-eyed, and, we are meant to see, spiritually renewed. That Zemeckis’s Cast Away does entirely without Friday, and replaces him with Wilson, undoubtedly has to do partly with the fact that the film is set in our own time; the filmmakers may well have thought that imagining an island visited by non-European ‘‘savages’’ in a postcolonial, globalized world was simply impossible. But the substitution of Wilson for Crusoe’s other is also an implicit acknowledgment that Friday is the book’s most problematic element. Still, the erasure of Friday is not without its own troubling aspects. In Cast Away, after all, Crusoe’s ‘‘companion’’ on the island has been turned into a true object, something thrown away, tied down, and finally lost without any real consequence. Seen in another light, Noland’s island might represent the world beyond the reach of the United States (and FedEx) as unpeopled and therefore as open to the West’s occupation and use. No matter how we view Wilson in Cast Away, however, the films based on Robinson Crusoe from 1952 onward make it clear that race, unlike the representation of loneliness or the fascination with technique, is one element of the original Crusoe narrative that must be radically revised in contemporary refashionings of Defoe’s novel.

In closing, it seems worthwhile to point out that when American television has turned its attention to Robinson Crusoe, it has done so in important part by turning the story inside out. Survivor and Lost make the experience of being cast away into a story of a group stranded on an island together. That story cannot be about loneliness; nor is it particularly about either technique or race. Rather it becomes a story of renewal as the result of the experience on the island. In Lost, particularly, all of the major inhabitants have pasts that they regret (lives of crime, familial conflicts, drug addiction, crippling wealth), and the island seems to offer them all an opportunity to start their lives over again. On Survivor, too, the contestants are presented with the chance of achieving great wealth and as a result the ability to start a new life. These shows, again particularly Lost, suggest that life back home is the problem and that the island offers at least the possibility of a solution to that problem. The ‘‘castaways’’ in Lost and Survivor, one could argue, share with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe the possibility of transformation as a result of their ordeal, but, in a way that is not true of Defoe’s novel, the television shows also embody a critique of the society from which the islanders have come. Still, although different in crucial ways from Defoe’s story, these offerings of contemporary American television, like the films made over the last sixty years as well as the literary reimaginings published almost from the moment Robinson Crusoe appeared, all testify to the continuing adaptability and enduring power of Defoe’s novel.