introduccion

Selkirk was able to survive in the island five years, after those the captain Woodes Rogers rescued him and incorporated him to his crew. In 1711, Selkirk Woodes returned to London and the following year Wood Rogers and the captain Edward Cooke published several stories narrating the adventures of Selkirk. Two years later Steele dedicated him an issue of his newspaper The Englishman, so Defoe had to know the case, although he does not mention it in none of his writings.
The similitaries between the adventure of Selkirk and the story of Crusoe are without a doubt many, although the differences are too. Perhaps they come closer in the interior process that both experiment from the desolation to the resignation and from there to the balance. But it doesn't fit doubt that the use that Defoe made of the Selkirk's story is not of a lot of importance in comparison with the novelty, the invention and the imagination that we find in Robinson Crusoe. On the other hand neither it seems logical that this is the only story that inspires Defoe. The works that he could have used are many, mainly inside the gender of the books of trips, such books as Historical Relation of Ceylon, by Robert Knox, or Voyage of François Leguat, by Maximilien Misson, or A New Voyage Round the World by Dampier.
Just as it happens with regard to the stories about Selkirk, Robinson Crusoe has many elements that approach it to the gender of the literature of trips, but also many that differentiate it from that type of works. The trip of Robinson is above all an imaginary trip, and the objective of the book is not by no means only the one of relating a trip and an adventure, but something much more complex and richer. It was or not its author aware of it, here a modern individual's valuable paradigm is presented. But, as in the books of trips, the author doesn't seem to pursue any artifice, but being limited to tell us thefacts in the possible clearer and more direct way. It seems, however, unquestionable that Defoe projected the assembling of the novel accurately. If as in words of Sutherland³ “all creative writing consists on a commitment among the foreseen and the fortuitous thing", Robinson Crusoe surprises for the harmony, in which a certain unquestionable improvisation underlies, by the ability with which the

NOTES:

3- SUTHERLAND, J., Daniel Defoe. A critical Study, Harvard, 1971.

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