ABSTRACT
The ambiguous nature of social identity on the island has implications beyond Friday’s presence. It also underlines the vulnerability and isolation of Crusoe’s island existence; all its aspects must be counteracted through faith in God. Michael Seidel has proposed a reading in which the island narrative becomes an allegorical version of ‘restored lost years’ which parallel the virtually concurrent Stuart reign from 1660 to 1688. Unlike the Garden of Eden, Crusoe’s island is soon to be a landscape marked by enclosure, agricultural cultivation, and the sound of gunshots. On another level, the ambiguity of social identity on Crusoe’s island is paralleled with an entirely unambiguous moral and economic imperative by which ‘honourable’ individuals are wholly consistent in their conduct and therefore reliable in all their transactions with Crusoe. The duration which Crusoe spends on the island itself, with its power to transform notions of social identity, is most heavily implicated in Crusoe’s eventual economic success.
