ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author provides answers for the following questions: Can movement through space tell anything about ideology? In what ways can the reactions of fictional protagonists to their surroundings indicate what texts mean? He addresses these questions in the context of two novels that take place within the tightly constrained environment of the desert island: Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and William Golding's Lord of the Flies. The author argues that Robinson Crusoe's and Crane Ralph's early movements on the desert island can respectively be seen as evoking and challenging modernity. For Michel Foucault, modernity was characterized by the use of discipline to ensure civic obedience. In order to reconstitute the criminal, it is necessary to discover "the disadvantage whose idea is such that it robs forever the idea of a crime of any attraction," using punishments that are "as unarbitrary as possible".
