Title:
READING THE WRECKAGE OF ISOLATED HUMANITY OR SHAPING THE CALVINIST TRUTH IN DEFOE’S ROBINSON CRUSOE

Authors:
Mariem Khmiri, Tunisia

Abstract:
When Edgar Allan Poe described Robinson Crusoe as: “a poem of […] a man on the run, who considers himself saved by Providence, should always however struggle, recognizing that his salvation is also in war, violence and murder,” he pointed to a theoretical commensurability between the two edges of the narrative: namely the Calvinistic outlook of a penitent and the overarching aspirations of the man facing the perils of primitive nature. Synonymous with the incident of the shipwreck as expedient to the rebirth of a Calvinist faithful was the tale of Crusoe –the diligent tradesman—who is also a Hobbesian individual in embryo. I chose Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as a propitious ground to dissect this built-in dualism of two diametrically opposite worldviews –namely the Calvinist and the Hobbesian—with special focus on the oxymoronic (rather than synonymous) nature of Crusoe’s experience whereby the two persist in their struggle while the outcome of this struggle remains forever beyond our ken.

Keywords:
Hobbesian, Calvinist, identity, dilemma

DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.37500/IJESSR.2020.3509