The 'realism' in Defoe´s style is very haunting; the celebrated ' details', like the last remains sighted of his fellows in the wreck:

' three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows'.

Or the list of things removed from the wreck. The prosaic writing, the endless details beget a feeling of confidence in so circumstancial (and so patently unsystematic) a writer. But the details in the new and desolate environment are charged with meaning and living force. Of course, Defoe always wrote a prose that, formally, was rather slipshod and clumsy-seeming. But by a stroke of genious, he makes this the most suitable narrative style in the world for an old not very well-educated trader, recalling adventures long past.

Crusoe´s rude shock at finding traces of the cannibals is a good instance of the power of this apparently unorganized writing, which presents the feeling as they rise:

' When I was come down the hill to the shore, as I said above, being the S.W. point of the island, I was perfectly confounded and amazed; nor is it possible for me to express the horror of my mind, at seeing the shore spread with skulls, hands, fett and other bones of human bodies; and particulary I observed a place where there had been a fire made, and a circle dug in the earth, like a cockpit, where it is supposed the savage wretches had sat down to their inhumane feastings upon the bodies of their fellow-creatures.'
 

SOURCE: ©Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe.
                © Penguin classics.
                © Edited with an introduction by Angus Ross.