Robinson Crusoe Counsels Against Solitude

In the three centuries since Robinson Crusoe, protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel, first appeared, he has become a global icon of solitude. His twenty-eight-year sojourn on a ‘desert’ island has come to symbolize solitariness at its most extreme; his methods of survival are the stuff of legend. But a closer look at Defoe’s writings on solitude shows that his views of the solitary life were complex and riddled with paradoxes. Why did a man who, as Crusoe, declared he had never been so happy as in solitude, later – also writing as Crusoe – condemn solitude as unnatural?