The Metaphysics of Robinson Crusoe

This essay argues that Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is a metaphysical text whose very preoccupation with the world of physical objects and actions unsettles the determinate structures of being to foster an enlarged sense of possibility and transformation. Defoe dares to imitate God’s infinitely various creation in his first novel, and he takes advantage of the sublime as a compositional mode that shakes up the hierarchy of species and causes. The hallmarks of realist representation--the physical, the particular, the individual, the circumstantial--have for too long been misinterpreted as the ends of Defoe’s fiction. In this essay, I argue that they are the means by which Defoe reveals the infinity of variety, the thinness of difference, and the plasticity of being.