Foe

by

J. M. Coetzee

Foe: Part 1 Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
“At last I could row no further,” Susan Barton declares—so adrift at sea, arms tired from rowing, she jumps in the water and swims. She eventually makes it to an island, where she collapses, petticoats and all. Before she can sleep, though, she looks up to see “a Negro man” (Friday).
The first sentence of Susan’s narrative makes several things clear. First, this is a story told through Susan’s eyes; all we have access to is her first-person narration. Second, the language Susan uses shows that she is writing several hundred years ago. And perhaps most importantly, Susan opens her story at a very unnatural place: in the middle of the ocean, without explaining how she got there.
Themes
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 Susan is hopeful that this man will save her life, but when she asks him for water in Portuguese, he does not respond. Immediately, noticing the spear by Friday’s side, Susan begins to fear that he is a cannibal; when he touches her skin, Susan panics that he is imagining what it would be like to eat her. No such thing happens, though, and eventually, Susan mimes her thirst so that Friday understands.
Susan’s initial reaction to Friday reflects her deeply ingrained racism: all she knows about this person is that he is Black, but immediately, she conflates his race with violence and (crucially) cannibalism. In reality, of course, Friday is patient and eager to help Susan quench her thirst.
Themes
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Embellishment vs. Deception Theme Icon
Friday leads Susan across the island, up a steep hill. At one point, Susan gets a thorn in her ankle, and Friday (who is shorter than Susan) has to carry her on his back. Susan notices that Friday can walk over these thorns without seeming to be in pain. Neither of them speaks the entire journey.
The fact that Friday does not feel the thorns in his feet suggests that he has been on this island long enough to grow physically accustomed to its harsh landscape. This image of Friday carrying Susan on his back will later recur, as it becomes an easy symbol of slavery for Susan.
Themes
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Susan describes the island, which she makes clear has nothing to do with the romantic places described in “travellers’ tales.” On this island, there are ants like the ones Susan encountered in Bahia, plus seaweed that gives off a terrible stench. The bushes are “drab” and do not flower, though there are all kinds of animals (apes, lizards, birds, and dolphins). Susan reflects that if animals were enough for her, she could be content—“but who,” she wonders, “accustomed to the fullness of human speech, can be content with caws and chirps”?
Even though Susan is writing a travel narrative, she is aware of the flaws with the form: such “tales” tend to exaggerate and romanticize the unappealing, boring reality of travel. It is also important to note that Susan’s devotion to the “fullness” of language; she struggles to relate to the other creatures on the island because she believes that language is the central ingredient of understanding and companionship.
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At the top of the hill, Susan can look out on the whole ocean, where she notices the boat that brought her to this island sailing away. She realizes that she is in a small encampment, and that another European man is present. She speaks to this new stranger in Portuguese, and he informs her that he speaks English. Susan comments on the man’s strange garb: long underwear like watermen wear on the Thames, and a tall, conic, fur cap. Meanwhile, Friday brings Susan water, and Susan drinks it greedily.
For the first time, readers begin to understand that Susan was intentionally left on this island—which makes her earlier omission of that fact more suspicious. From his language and dress, it is clear that this new man Susan has encountered is from England (the Thames is a river in London).
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Susan explains that the crew of the nearby ship mutinied and killed their captain, casting her adrift with the captain’s dead body. Recalling the spear stuck through the captain’s eye, Susan breaks down into tears. The stranger watches her, and Susan tells her audience that he is “of course the Cruso I told you about.” 
The gaps in Susan’s story now become even more apparent—why did the crew want her off their ship, in addition to the captain? And even more interestingly, who is Susan talking to? Clearly, her story is addressed to one person in particular, and it is someone she knows well (as she has already told this person about Cruso prior to the start of this narrative). 
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Susan now goes into detail about the encampment. In the center of two big rocks, Cruso had built himself a hut. Beyond the hut, Cruso had erected a leather barrier, fencing off a triangle of land that he calls his “castle.” Within the fence, Cruso grows wild lettuce, which Susan explains is—along with fish and eggs—the only thing they eat on the island.
Like Friday, Cruso has been on the island for a while (or at least long enough to build this expansive encampment). Once again, Susan’s detailed description of the island reveals it to be a less interesting place than typical travel narratives would suggest.
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Cruso gives Susan a handmade needle to help her take the thorn out of her foot. While she extracts it, Susan tells Cruso her story: she was born to a Frenchman and an Englishwoman, and she was raised in England. Two years earlier, her only daughter had been kidnapped and brought to the New World. Susan traveled to Bahia, Brazil, to find her daughter, but was given no help from the Brazilian government and so failed in her mission.
Though the loss of her daughter is dramatic, the stuff of juicy stories, Susan is unwilling to dwell on it (either in her narrative or, apparently, in her conversation with Cruso). Later, as Susan tries to find material to enliven her tale, her refusal to reveal more information about her daughter will get in the way of her authorial ambitions. 
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At last, Susan had given up, and had booked passage on a merchant’s ship back to Lisbon. But ten days into that journey, the crew had mutinied, stranding Susan here. She reflects that she does not why she was cast away by the crew, other than that people often start to hate those they have abused.
The clues are tricky to spot, but it is becoming harder to ignore that Susan is a somewhat unreliable narrator. Rather than questioning why the ship’s crew might distrust her, Susan paints herself as an “abused” victim of others’ ill will. 
Themes
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Embellishment vs. Deception Theme Icon
Having finished her story, Susan now becomes Cruso’s “second subject”; the first is Friday, whom Susan now knows is Cruso’s manservant. Susan tells her reader that she wishes she could supply Cruso’s backstory, but the stories he told her were so contradictory that she thinks even Cruso himself does not know what is real and what is fantasy.
There are no laws on this island, much less a government, yet Cruso still rules, keeping Susan and Friday as his “subjects.” This hierarchy reflects broader racial and gender hierarchies; even on a remote island, the white man (Cruso) has more power than his Black or female counterparts.
Themes
Enslavement, Silence, and Erasure Theme Icon
Gender and Creation Theme Icon
Sometimes, Cruso says he was born rich, while other times he claims to be an orphan who had been captured by Moors. He also tells different stories about Friday: he says sometimes that Friday was a “little slave-boy” when they met, sometimes that Friday was a cannibal. Susan fears that the cannibals will one day return for Friday, and Cruso acknowledges that this is a possibility.
Again, Susan speculates about whether Friday is a cannibal. But crucially, this time cannibalism acts as a cover story for the much more likely reality: namely, that Friday was enslaved and that he was not a source of brutality but a victim of it. Continually, then, Susan seems to manipulate the boundaries between victim and victimizer. 
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Embellishment vs. Deception Theme Icon
Quotes
While they eat, Susan wonders aloud why Cruso has never tried to escape. Cruso explains that they are hundreds of miles from Brazil, the nearest shore—and even if they did get to Brazil, he argues, it is “full of cannibals.” Privately, Susan begins to understand that life on an island has narrowed Cruso’s worldview, and that he will never have any real desire to leave.
Even as Susan manipulates reality in her own narrative, she is critical of Cruso when he does the exact same thing. Cruso claims to be afraid of escaping, but actually, he just has grown accustomed to the shapelessness and freedom of his island days.
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Cruso offers Susan his bed, but she refuses, instead sleeping on a nearby mat. Though she struggles to fall asleep, haunted by her change in circumstances, she eventually grows calm. When she wakes the next morning, it is raining hard. For the next several days, the weather alternates endlessly back-and-forth between wind and rain. More than the loneliness or the strange diet, Susan feels that the wind is unbearable.
One of the most important contrasts Susan draws is between the adventure-filled “traveller’s tales” and the boring, repetitive truth of her time on the island. The nonstop wind illustrates this monotony: rather than the chatter and bustle of urban life (whether in London or Bahia), on the island there is only one endless, meaningless sound.
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In addition to the encampment, Cruso has made himself several tools. One of these is a knife, saved from his own shipwreck, which he tells Susan to use for protection against the apes; though the apes avoid Friday and himself, Cruso thinks they will not fear Susan because she is a woman. Susan is skeptical of this. The other tools, wooden bowls and a spade, have all been crafted from the wood and stone on the island.  Susan laments that Cruso does not have better tools with which to plan an escape.
Cruso believes gender differences are so essential that even the apes will pick up on them, but Susan is not so sure. Instead, she begins to wonder if gender is a socialized idea, created by human norms and behavior as opposed to existing in nature. 
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There is also a stove in Cruso’s hut, and some treated ape skins. Tellingly, however, there is no journal or pen. Susan does not understand why Cruso does not want to write things down, and thus preserve a record of his time on the island; after all, as she points out, memory is faulty. But Cruso insists that “nothing I have forgotten is worth the remembering.”
In this vital exchange, Susan begins to understand just how different she and Cruso are. Whereas Cruso is dedicated to making life on the island as comfortable as it can possibly be, Susan merely wants to record her life and get away, sucking a good story out of this remote locale and then leaving it behind.
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This logic upsets Susan, who insists that without the inclusion of everyday details, “life begins to lose its particularities”—how could an outsider believe Cruso’s story is true and his own if he does not write down the details? Susan even suggests some ways that Cruso could make writing implements, but Cruso stands firm, telling her that the only thing he wants to leave behind are his terraces and walls.
Both Susan and Cruso are interested in building a legacy, but the legacies they are interested in are very different. Susan wants to make a name for herself to those beyond the island, but Cruso wants to be remembered on the island, for any future inhabitants that may (or may not) come.
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Quotes
At night, Susan still sleeps near Cruso, using ape skins as blankets. She does not like the smell of the ape skins or the sound of Cruso grinding his teeth, but Susan is proud that her time in Bahia has taught her to be less “dainty.” Sometimes, she dreams of the murdered ship captain.
Susan’s romantic life is complicated and mysterious (and will remain as such). But it is evident that she feels some sort of attachment to the murdered captain, dreaming about him even weeks later. And there is also an almost-romantic intimacy in the way she shares space with Cruso, packed close even on a large, deserted, island. 
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One day, Susan explores the island against Cruso’s wishes. When she returns, he is angry at her for disobeying him—but she replies that she is “a castaway, not a prisoner.” Later that evening, Susan asks Cruso for a needle and thread to make shoes, but he tells her to be patient. Days pass, and Susan still does not have any shoes.
Just as Susan questions Cruso’s claims about the apes’ sexism, she now begins to doubt the rigid power structures (implicitly based on gender and race) that Cruso enforces.
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A while later, Susan tries telling Friday to bring more wood. Friday stands, but does nothing, and Cruso explains that he only knows the word “firewood,” not the word “wood.” Cruso also tells Susan that Friday knows very few words of English, which upsets Susan, who thinks that language is the key to civilization and happiness. Instead of answering, Cruso just instructs Friday to sing, which he does.  
In his interactions with Friday, Cruso uses language—and its absence—as a tool he can use to assert dominance. Because Cruso does not try to impart real understanding to Friday of what wood or firewood is, the words become purely orders, a way of bending Friday to his will. Susan is critical of this—and at the same time, she refuses to give any real credence to one of Friday’s other forms of expression: his singing. 
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Cruso then shocks Susan by saying that Friday cannot speak—he has had his tongue cut out by “slavers.” Susan wonders why anyone would do this, and Cruso gives three possibilities: maybe the slavers view tongue as a delicacy, maybe they didn’t want to hear Friday cry in grief, or maybe they were punishing him for his cannibalism. Susan is frightened that Cruso seems to be smiling as he says all of this.
Friday’s missing tongue will become one of the most important symbols in the novel. As Cruso presents it, it once again shows how Cruso (and Susan) prefer to turn Friday into an object of fear rather than acknowledging the brutality of his enslavement; mutilating is a horrific act, but Cruso smiles through it, painting it as a fitting punishment for Friday’s (made-up) cannibalism.
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Susan becomes obsessed by Friday’s mutilated tongue, and she finds it increasingly difficult to be around him without thinking about the horrible act. She wonders why Providence has dealt Friday so terrible a hand, and Cruso replies that “if Providence were to watch over all of us…who would be left to pick the cotton and cut the sugarcane?”
Cruso’s statement here is a tacit endorsement of slavery and all of its evils: he is prioritizing the economic gains of slavery over the bodily and emotional evils it entails. Though Susan distances herself from Cruso on other issues, tellingly, she does not push back against this sentiment.
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Quotes
Tired of waiting for Cruso, Susan eventually makes herself shoes. Unsurprisingly, Cruso is annoyed by this, and the two get into a fight. After a few hours, Susan remembers that her position on the island is precarious, and she apologizes to Cruso. That night, she feels some measure of real joy when she begins to feel the ground swaying beneath her, proof that she is on an island.
Susan has only been on the island for a short time, but already, she is beginning to understand Cruso’s acceptance of this deserted place. Throughout Foe, islands often symbolize loneliness or disconnection, so Susan’s new joy about the swaying ground signals that she is seeing the virtues of isolation.
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Now that Susan has shoes, she starts walking all over the island, feeling herself slip into a kind of “waking slumber.” Though Susan sometimes pushes for change—for example, suggesting candles so that they can have light after the sun goes down—Cruso will not stand for any of it. Susan begins to crave a space that feels like hers, even though she knows that the island does not actually belong to Cruso.
Susan’s isolationism continues as, despite her already limited amount of human contact, she seeks even more independence from her companions. Her “waking slumber” could suggest that Susan is struggling with depression—but since she is writing in the early 18th century, she lacks the language to describe such a condition. 
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A month into Susan’s stay, Cruso comes back to the hut feeling ill (“it is the old fever that came with me,” he explains). For 12 days and nights, Susan take care of Cruso, who is often overcome by fits of raving. Meanwhile, Friday avoids the hut, only catching and scaling fish for Susan and playing his flute. Once, Susan gets so sick of hearing the flute play that she grabs it out of Friday’s hands, much to his surprise.
Cruso’s backstory remains mysterious—but unlike with Friday, Susan does not speculate on it. Also worth noting is the fact that, once again, Susan disregards or is frustrated by Friday’s preferred form of expression (music).
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Cruso seems to be feeling better, until a giant storm sweeps the island, and he descends back into fever. Between Cruso’s ravings—he keeps saying the word “Massa”—and Friday’s flute-playing, Susan begins to feel like she is in “a madhouse.” As the rain starts to slow down, Susan stretches her body across Cruso’s, hoping to keep him warm and save his life.
The strange word “Massa” is probably a link to Más a Tierra, an island off the coast of Chile where Alexander Selkirk—the real-life inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s novel of the same name—was marooned. Today, Más a Tierra has been renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in honor of Defoe’s novel. It’s also worth noting that “Massa” sounds like the word “master,” which perhaps says something about Cruso’s past, the possibility that he has been an enslaver, and the nature of his relationship with Friday.
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That night, Susan wakes to find that Cruso is touching her sexually, which makes her think of the Portuguese captain. Susan considers resisting, but then feels bad that Cruso has not had sexual relations with a woman in so many years, so she gives in. She does not know whether or not this was the right choice.
This kind of sexual contact (outside of wedlock) would have been scandalous for the period, but Susan does not dwell on it, even as she hopes for more scandals to write about. Moreover, this is the first time that Susan reveals her sexual history with the murdered ship captain; perhaps it was this loyalty to the captain that made the crew cast her out during the mutiny.
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Days later, Susan is out for a walk when she notices an unusual occurrence. Though she has seen Friday on the water fishing many times, she has never seen him go out to sea for non-fishing purposes. But now, he is spreading petals on the water, which to Susan is the “first sign that a spirit or soul…stirred beneath that dull and unpleasing exterior.”
The mysterious petals will be important throughout the book: are they an act of artistic creation? A kind of mourning or commemoration? Either way, Susan intuits that the petals are important, even as she continues to make profoundly anti-Black assessments of Friday (denying him a “spirit” because of judgments on his “exterior”). 
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When Susan pushes Cruso to go back into his wrecked ship and look for tools, Cruso refuses. Instead, he remains dead set on building out his terraces: patches of ground that have been levelled and cleared and reinforced with stone. But to Susan’s surprise, Cruso does not plan to plant anything on his terraces. Rather, the planting is reserved for future visitors to the island. Cruso proudly tells Susan that though he is a castaway by circumstance, he is not a castaway “at heart.”
The terraces reveal important new information about Cruso: though he has previously seemed unfriendly and detached, he does desire to give back to his island home somehow (even if the terraces without crops lack logic). By saying he is not a castaway “at heart,” Cruso is suggesting that the norms of community and society still matter to him.
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Quotes
Susan grows frustrated by Cruso’s irrational behavior, and by his refusal to write or look for tools or even have a real conversation with her. She reflects that even if Cruso is to be rescued, his story will be boring and unsatisfying to the masses, who are hungry for more exciting adventure tales. For a time, Susan goes into a “lethargy,” tying furs around her face so she cannot hear and moaning in discontent.
In contrast to Cruso, who wants to improve their island home, Susan wants only to escape the island, converting their time there into a story with mass appeal. In other words, both Susan and Cruso want to leave a legacy, but Susan is more extractive and more interested in gaining something tangible from this experience.
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Eventually, Susan comes out of her despair, and is able to return to life with Cruso and Friday. Though Cruso never touches her again, she tells her reader that if she had stayed on the island much longer, she would have wanted to have a child with Cruso—she could not bear this lonely silence much longer.
Susan seems to link childbearing less with sexual desire and more with the desire to create—to have more people to speak with. Throughout the novel, Susan will continue to conflate childbearing with other forms of linguistic creation.
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Susan also begins to become curious about what kind of laws exist on the island. When she asks Cruso about it, he insists that there are no laws. Susan fears that without laws, they could all be cruel or tyrannical to each other—yet they are not. Cruso explains that he does not believe in any sort of punishment, which causes Susan to reflect that perhaps being on the island forever is punishment enough.
Susan’s curiosity about the laws is perhaps another way in which she questions the default power structures in London and Bahia; if there are no laws, why do she and Friday still defer to Cruso as their leader?
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Sometimes, however, Susan views Cruso with more admiration. After all, if her first days on the island were so difficult, how terrible must it have been for Cruso? She is impressed that he can find so much meaning from sea and sky, which to her feel empty.
Just like any avid reader of “traveller’s tales,” Susan is hungry for juicy stories and intricate detail. But Cruso finds meaning instead from the massive blankness of sea and sky, from the very lack of detail and human interest in the natural world.
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Quotes
About a year after Susan’s arrival on the island, Cruso becomes sick again—and this time, his illness seems deadly. But as if by fate, a ship headed to Bristol (the “John Hobart”) passes by the island. The travelers agree to take Susan and Cruso back to England, and Susan ensures that they do not forget Friday, either.
Susan’s decision to bring Friday deprives Friday of agency; even though he cannot speak, Susan could try to figure out what he actually wants. The ‘John Hobart’ ship is named for a famous British politician.
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While the crew looks for Friday, Susan and the captain, Captain Smith, share a delicious dinner. The captain suggests that Susan should write down her story, as there has never been a female castaway. But Susan assures him that her time on the island was boring, not good enough for a book to be written.
Susan has made it clear that she intends to use her experiences for a book of some kind, so it is revealing that she does not want to center herself—just as she does not reveal details to her reader about her daughter or her time in Bahia. It seems ever more likely that Susan is obscuring something from her own past.
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At last, Friday is found and brought to the ship. Friday is confused and afraid of these new circumstances, but Susan does her best to comfort him, making her voice warm even though they do not share language. Susan sleeps in Cruso’s cabin, and she pleads that Friday should sleep on the floor in front of the cabin: he would rather sleep there, she argues, “than on the softest bed in Christendom.”
Just as she forces Friday onto the ship, Susan now forces Friday into discomfort (sleeping on the floor instead of a bed). This paternalistic logic reflects much of the discourse around slavery as a whole at the time, which dictated that slavery was a “positive good,” as white people could “educate” the Black people they enslaved.
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The doctors come every day to let Cruso’s blood and try to cure his fever, but to no avail. Meanwhile, Captain Smith persuades Susan to tell everyone that she and Cruso are married so as to avoid uncomfortable questions. Susan does so and tries not to notice when the captain propositions her one night over dinner.
Bloodletting was an early modern practice in which doctors would take blood from their patients, believing that by ridding the body of contaminated blood, it could heal faster. Susan’s instinct to not sleep with the captain perhaps reflects her previous experience, when she slept with the Portuguese captain and then was cast off the ship for doing so.
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Eventually, Susan comes to believe that Cruso is dying of woe at having been separated from their island. She lies next to him and calls him “my Cruso”; she reminds him of the stars on the island, and wonders if they were “nearer the heavens” there. Susan begins to touch and lick and lie on Cruso, as if she is “swimming” in him. Sometimes, she fantasizes about returning to the island with a sack of corn to finally plant Cruso’s terraces.
In this strange scene, Susan starts to experience the sexual desire for Cruso she never actually felt on the island; for her, it seems that Cruso has become the personification of the island itself (she can “swim” in him, suggesting he has become, physically, like their ocean). Similarly, Susan’s newfound resolution to plant the terraces suggests that for the first time, she wants to give back to the island just as Cruso did.
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Three days out from England, Cruso dies. The crew holds a small funeral, and Susan wonders if Friday is capable of understanding what death is. Susan wonders what the crew makes of her—and then she wonders what Mr. Foe, the “you” she has been addressing her tale to, makes of her. Ultimately, though, Susan realizes that it doesn’t matter what Mr. Foe thinks: “it is I who have disposal of all that Cruso leaves behind,” Susan brags, “which is the story of his island.”
There are two key things to take away from this passage. First, Susan has been telling her story to Mr. Foe—her name for Daniel Defoe, or the real-life author who would ultimately go on to publish the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe. Second, Susan seems aware of her newfound power as an eyewitness and narrator—the island may have belonged to Cruso, but she has sole ownership over the “story” of that island.
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Quotes