Abstract
Robinson Crusoe, a pivotal work in the rise of the novel, is widely regarded as a puritan’s spiritual autobiography which expresses one’s struggle with personal faith and reason. Based on the current trend of revisiting and rewriting Robinson Crusoe, this thesis examines its inconsistencies, ostensible repetitions and contradictions to puritan ethics. It argues all these narrative operations reveal deep psychological mechanism in one’s mind. Furthermore, these “narrative anxiety” as I shall call it and elaborate, become the backbone of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Given the deep psychologized narrative tendency in the novel, I will return to the root of psychoanalysis to discuss Robinson Crusoe’s source of anxiety. As Lacan tells us anxiety is “not without an object;” it further points to one’s innermost desire, “an object that cannot be symbolized.” Therefore, when one suffers from anxiety, it compels the subject to substitute his anxiety for something concrete and further into the imaginary order both provisionally and repeatedly. Thus anxiety is not only a crucial element for identity formation but also a key affect which reflects onto one’s first-person narrative textually. In this regard, Crusoe’s first-person narrative brings anxiety into textual representations, notably, the great amount of things and Crusoe’s ambivalent attitudes cannot be simply judged as immature writing; instead, they reflect a process which the subject aims to neutralize and deal with his own anxiety. Through revisiting Crusoe’s narrative, this thesis reworks some key problems in Ian Watt’s notions of formal realism. By doing so, one can see formal realism does not simply aim to be real by inducing particular things, time and spaces; instead, it reflects the omnipresent anxiety when the subject sets to the world. The rise of the novel is not only a transformation of artistic convention, but also reveals modern people’s interest in self, identity and mental operation.