representative
morality in the whole medieval religious English theatre. Everyman has
succumbed before the sin, but God finally helps him to reach the salvation
that he is fated.
God and only God is
the speaker and antagonistic of Robinson Crusoe; it is the only dialogue
source that satisfies him and fills him.
For the first time
Defoe dramatises with extraordinary precision and in extreme situation
the English individual's psychological position after the Protestant Reformation.
And if there is something that implies this reformation is in fact the
liquidation of a very important part of the community elements of the Christian
religion. The reformist impulse puts the emphasis mainly in the human being
direct relationship with God, and what decreases is in fact the community
religious acts. The Protestant Christian should read the Bible and interpret
it in the solitude of their heart. after the Rebirth, the European man
has gone charging trust in his individuality and spreads now to reduce
his dependence with regard to the community. These transformations affect
deeply, as it is comprehensible, the artistic manifestations that take
place in the new religious and mental context. As in any other work wefind
in Robinson Crusoe for first time the modern convict and pawned man in
a difficult dialogue with God, dialogue that is characterised above all
to be personal, and that he owes to invent without ritual sentences neither
inherited formulas. For that reason in this book the religious reflection
is the one that grants unit and moving consistency to the internal and
external events that happen in her and it is the one which establishes
the continuity and the coherence of the character of Robinson Crusoe; it
is finally the one that organises his interior life and confers the character
a syntax and an own vocabulary. The autobiography of Crusoe is in this
way above all a spiritual autobiography, and the victory of Robinson Crusoe
on the material thing is only secondary, because his true victory consists
on the discovery of the divine Providence and of the help and orientation
that this lends him to be unwrapped by the difficult path that the destination
has afforded him.
However, the great
modernity and the great novelty of Robinson Crusoe doesn't end up by no
means with the manifestation of the modern individual's perspective in
his relationship with God. In an environment in growing process of secularization
like in the case of Robinson Crusoe and of Defoe,the sound of the voice
of Crusoe in his dialogue with the divinity is muffled and deafened by
the physical
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Academic
Year 00-01
07/02/2001
©a.r.e.a.
Dr. Vicente Forés López
©Ana
Aroa Alba Cuesta
Universitat
de València Press