The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is told in the first person as the looking-back confession of a man whose life went wrong at the start. Born to a comfortable family in York, he ignores his father's earnest counsel to stay in the secure middle station of life and runs away to sea at eighteen. A first storm terrifies him into brief repentance, but the resolve wears off, and a restless craving for the wider world keeps pulling him back to the water and into trouble.

His early voyages bring trade, then captivity among the Moors, then escape and a profitable spell as a planter in Brazil. Greedy for quicker gain, he joins a voyage to fetch slaves from Africa and is wrecked in a storm. He alone survives, washed onto an uninhabited island, where he watches the rest of the ship's company drown and finds himself entirely cut off from human society.

The long heart of the book is the methodical work of staying alive. Crusoe ferries tools, arms, and provisions from the broken ship, judging the carpenter's chest more valuable than a cargo of gold. He builds a fortified home, a country bower, shelves and furniture, an earthenware kiln, fields of barley and rice, and a flock of tamed goats. He keeps a post-calendar and a journal, and out of bare extremity he slowly manufactures a whole private economy.

Sickness brings a turning point. Feverish and afraid, Crusoe begins to read the Bible salvaged from the wreck, and reinterprets his whole story as the work of Providence punishing his disobedience and then sparing him. He learns to set the good against the evil of his lot like a debtor-and-creditor account, and concludes that deliverance from sin matters more than deliverance from the island. The castaway's tale becomes a conversion narrative.

After years alone he finds a single footprint in the sand and is thrown into dread of cannibals who visit the shore. He rescues a captive, names him Friday for the day, makes him a servant and convert, and gathers a small household over whom he reckons himself absolute lord. At last he helps retake a mutinied ship, and after twenty-eight years on the island returns to England a wealthy man, his Brazil estate having prospered in his absence.