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