Friday -  A twenty-six years old Caribbean native and cannibal who converts to Protestantism under Crusoe’s tutelage. Friday becomes Crusoe’s servant after he saves his life when Friday is about to be eaten by other cannibals. Friday never appears to resist or resent his new servitude, and he may sincerely view it as appropriate compensation for having his life saved. But whatever Friday’s response may be, his servitude has become a symbol of imperialist oppression throughout the modern world. Friday’s overall charisma works against the emotional deadness that many readers find in Crusoe.

The Portuguese Captain -  The sea captain who picks up Crusoe and the slave boy Xury from their boat after they escape from their Moorish captors and float down the African coast. The Portuguese captain takes Crusoe to Brazil and thus inaugurates Crusoe’s new life as plantation owner. The Portuguese captain is never named—unlike Xury, for example—and his anonymity suggests a certain uninteresting blandness in his role in the novel. He is polite, personable, and extremely generous to Crusoe, buying the animal skins and the slave boy from Crusoe at well over market value. He is loyal as well, taking care of Crusoe’s brazilian investments even after a twenty-eight years absence. His role in Crusoe’s life is crucial, since he both arranges for Crusoe’s new career as a plantation owner and helps Crusoe cash in on the profits later.

The Spaniard -  One of the men from the Spanish ship that is wrecked off Crusoe’s island, and whose crew is rescued by the cannibals and taken to a neighboring island. The Spaniard is doomed to be eaten as a ritual victim of the cannibals when Crusoe saves him. In exchange, he becomes a new “subject” in Crusoe’s “kingdom,” at least according to Crusoe. The Spaniard is never fleshed out much as a character in Crusoe’s narrative, an example of the odd impersonal attitude often notable in Crusoe.

Xury -  A non-white (Arab or black) slave boy only briefly introduced during the period of Crusoe’s enslavement in Sallee. When Crusoe escapes with two other slaves in a boat, he forces one to swim to shore but keeps Xury on board, showing a certain trust toward the boy. Xury never betrays that trust. Nevertheless, when the Portuguese captain eventually picks them up, Crusoe sells Xury to the captain. Xury’s sale shows us the racist double standards sometimes apparent in Crusoe’s behavior.

The Widow -  Appearing briefly, but on two separate occasions in the novel, the widow keeps Crusoe’s 200 pounds safe in England throughout all his thirty-five years of journeying. She returns it loyally to Crusoe upon his return to England and, like the Portuguese captain and Friday, reminds us of the goodwill and trustworthiness of which humans can be capable, whether European or not.

But Crusoe’s admirable qualities must be weighed against the flaws in his character. Crusoe seems incapable of deep feelings, as shown by his cold account of leaving his family—he worries about the religious consequences of disobeying his father, but never displays any emotion about leaving. Though he is generous toward people, as when he gives gifts to his sisters and the captain, Crusoe reveals very little tender or sincere affection in his dealings with them. When Crusoe tells us that he has gotten married and that his wife has died all within the same sentence, his indifference to her seems almost cruel. Moreover, as an individual personality, Crusoe is rather dull. his precise and deadpan style of narration works well for recounting the process of canoe building, but it tends to drain the excitement from events that should be thrilling. Action-packed scenes like the conquest of the cannibals become quite humdrum when Crusoe narrates them, giving us a detailed inventory of the cannibals in list form, for example. His insistence on dating events makes sense to a point, but it ultimately ends up seeming obsessive and irrelevant when he tells us the date on which he grinds his tools but neglects to tell us the date of a very important event like meeting Friday. Perhaps his impulse to record facts carefully is not a survival skill, but an irritating sign of his neurosis.

Finally, while not boasting of heroism, Crusoe is nonetheless very interested in possessions, power, and prestige. When he first calls himself king of the island it seems jocund, but when he describes the Spaniard as his subject we must take his royal delusion seriously, since it seems he really does consider himself king. His teaching Friday to call him “Master,” even before teaching him the words for “yes” or “no,” seems obnoxious even under the racist standards of the day, as if Crusoe needs to hear the ego-boosting word spoken as soon as possible. Overall, Crusoe’s virtues tend to be private: his industry, resourcefulness, and solitary courage make him an exemplary individual. But his vices are social, and his urge to subjugate others is highly objectionable. In bringing both sides together into one complex character, Defoe gives us a fascinating glimpse into the successes, failures, and contradictions of modern man.

Both stories present similar plots and elements, even if they are told in different times with the 

social, cultural and historical context playing a big roll in them.

Defoe’s novel tells the story of a midde class man Robinson Crusoe. In spite of his father’s 

warning, he decides to leave his family at the age of nineteen and go to sea to make his own 

fortune. After many adventures, he lands in Brazil where he esabilishes a plantation, but one day, while his travelling to Africa to buy some slaves for his business, he gets shiprecked on a desert island where he fights for his survival in many different ways for nearly three decades. After that long time he gets rescued by an English ship which brings him back to England where Robinson discovers that, due to his platation, he became rich.

On the other hand there is Chuck, the Cast Away movie’s hero. He is an executive of sorts for 

FedEx and while he is celebrating Christmas with his family and friends he gets an important call from work which makes him board on a plane right away. While he is travelling the aircraft ends up in a severe storm that leads to a plane crush into the Ocean, where only Chuck escapes with a life raft. He finds himself on a desert island with a volleyball as his only companion, trying to survive for four years.  After that long period of time, Chuck is depressed and hopeless and decides to leave the island on a raft built by himself. He strugges to make it through the waves of the ocean, but he gets rescued by a ship passing by him and flies back to Memphis, his home town. There he understands that many things have changed throughout the years and that his girlfriend Kelly has moved on with her life because she thought Chuck was dead.

 

The two stories present a middle class hero with different values and beliefs.

In Defoe’s novel Robinson is a roll model of the 18th century enlighted society. He is a hard-

working and restless young man who acts with transgression and disobedience. He’s also a religious man and the shipwrecked is seen by him as a punishment from God for his bad behaviour towards his father. Crusoe seems incapable of deep feelings, as shown by his cold account of leaving his family. On the island he has to face cannibales, but at the end he’s got the primary needs in order to survive (goats, fruits, turtle’s eggs and companion animals).

Cast Away’s Chuck finds himself in a more realistic situation instead. Chuck seems pretty indifferent when he discovers that his girlfriend had moved on because of all he had learned on the island.. He’s got only coconuts and fish to survive on, but like Robinson, he’s a strong and orderly man and his being on a desert island simbolizes a punishment (for working on Christmas) which also represents what it’s like to be in the middle class today. 

Defoe was above all a journalist and when he wrote his masterpiece, Robinson, he was already 58 years old. In addition, he published his novels in general, trying to pass them off as true stories (memorials and autobiographies).

 The main reason why Defoe wrote was, apparently, the need to pay his debts.

The time of the narration is marked with a rigorous dating. In fact the dates are frequent and sometimes even significant. For example, September 1st is the date of his departure from his hometown and the next one from Brazil which leads him to the shipwreck. September 30th, the day of his birth, is also the one in which he lands shipwrecked on the island. Robinson himself spots this strange recurrence on the dates of important events in his life. There are summaries and ellipses. The digressions are infrequent, because the whole story is seen through the eyes of the protagonist, and rarely moves away from his ura. There are no valid time stamps with reference to the text. The protagonist keeps track of the days making notches on his hut that serve as a calendar.

Place

Even the dating of space is extremely detailed. Numerous English towns (Winterton Ness, Hull, Yarmouth), Guinea, Brazil and Morocco are mentioned. Some geographical locations are even reported.

It can also be considered a symbolic space, that is, the place in which man faces life with his bare hands, and can only survive by appealing to that instinct typical of the savage, which lies within each of us.