ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Defoe's best-known work whose hero shares his adventures from his own perspective after he rejects his father's advice to stay content with 'the upper Station of Low Life'. It reviews Robinson Crusoe's role as the quintessential self-made individual as it unravels his three-volume circumnavigation of the globe and his dreams of a British and Christian empire. Robinson Crusoe's first-person account of a private individual's life bears the anxieties and contradictions in early eighteenth-century dreams stirred by English global ambitions. Crusoe's construction of personal identity is balanced against external analogues. As Crusoe lives and relives his experiences in three volumes, patterns resonate and reinforce each other like the ties and joints within a house. Defoe involves the reader both in sympathetic and imaginative identification with a first-person narrative and in an equally alert and sceptical reflexive recognition of the construction of perceptions, thoughts and reflections that constitute their own self-image of a personal identity.
