ABSTRACT
Recent years have seen an increasing critical emphasis on the spiritual significance of Robinson Crusoe rather than on its economic implications. Ian Watt’s reading of the novel has now found a corrective in two important studies, G. A. Starr’s Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, and J. Paul Hunter’s The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in ‘Robinson Crusoe’. Like Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton is a retrospective narrative, following, as Shiv K. Kumar has suggested, the redemptive scheme that is apparent in Defoe’s first novel. But it is not so insistent here as in Crusoe, and John J. Richetti seems nearer the spirit of the work as a whole. Colonel Jack is largely about the quest for gentility. Colonel Jack also manifests a concern with the workings of Providence, a concern which coincides, inevitably, with its hero’s admissions of guilt or stirrings of repentance.
