ABSTRACT
In the earlier discussions of Crusoe and Moll, it has become apparent that neither book achieved complete thematic organisation or concentration. Crusoe was as compendious and episodic as adventure tales most appropriately were, and could not be articulated by the appearance and development of themes. The distinction between fact and fiction is conventional enough, and repeats the earlier protestations in the Prefaces to Crusoe and Moll. The political element should not be forgotten, but the retrospective view is most powerfully presented as a grim confessional. Rather than being a racy expose of universal corruption, the tale concentrates its energies on an intense presentation of its narrator’s sense of guilt and shame. Roxana’s recollection of her lost innocence, and of her sense of having been cheated, becomes most passionate in her denunciations of her first husband. It is made clear that Roxana, like Moll, falls into her first crimes more through need than through inclination.
