Robinson Crusoe is thought by many to be the first English novel. It has haunted the literary and critical imagination since its publication, returning in guise after guise: in The Swiss Family Robinson; in Luis Bunuel’s 1954 film The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, in Robert Zemeckis’s 2000 movie Castaway; in J. M. Coetzee’s novel Foe. The novel presents the reader with a fundamental, and fascinating, scenario. The prolonged and intense solitude of Robinson, shipwrecked on a desert island, strips him of the tools that have enabled him to live, returning him to a naked confrontation with the essential problems of his existence, including his personal connection with God, his relationship with the natural world that surrounds him, and with civilization as he knew it. In the vast silence even words begin to desert him. He tries to keep a diary in order to stay in touch with his civilized self, but as time goes by the small supply of ink that he salvages from the shipwreck starts, inevitably, to fail. He waters the ink down so that it might last him a little longer, but the words that he writes become fainter and fainter, until they disappear altogether, leaving the pages of Robinson’s diary as blank as his horizon. This encounter with total solitude does not lead Robinson to madness, to silence, or to despair. Rather, Robinson discovers in his enforced solitude the basis for a new kind of writing, and for a new kind of self-consciousness. Just as he fashions new tools for himself from the materials that he has at hand, so too does he invent a new way of telling himself the story of his life and of his world. It is this newly forged narrative form that Robinson bequeaths to a world on the brink of Enlightenment, the narrative form in which we continue, even now, to tell ourselves the stories of our lives. PB