Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Counting and Measuring
Crusoe is a careful note-taker whenever numbers and quantities
are involved. He does not simply tell us that his hedge encloses
a large space, but informs us with a surveyor’s precision that the
space is “150 yards in length, and 100 yards
in breadth.” He tells us not simply that he spends a long time making
his canoe in Chapter XVI, but that it takes precisely twenty days
to fell the tree and fourteen to remove the branches. It is not
just an immense tree, but is “five foot ten inches in diameter at
the lower part . . . and four foot eleven inches diameter at the
end of twenty-two foot.” Furthermore, time is measured with similar
exactitude, as Crusoe’s journal shows. We may often wonder why Crusoe
feels it useful to record that it did not rain on December 26,
but for him the necessity of counting out each day is never questioned.
All these examples of counting and measuring underscore Crusoe’s
practical, businesslike character and his hands-on approach to life.
But Defoe sometimes hints at the futility of Crusoe’s measuring—as
when the carefully measured canoe cannot reach water or when his
obsessively kept calendar is thrown off by a day of oversleeping.
Defoe may be subtly poking fun at the urge to quantify, showing
us that, in the end, everything Crusoe counts never really adds
up to much and does not save him from isolation.
Eating
One of Crusoe’s first concerns after his shipwreck is
his food supply. Even while he is still wet from the sea in Chapter
V, he frets about not having “anything to eat or drink to comfort
me.” He soon provides himself with food, and indeed each new edible
item marks a new stage in his mastery of the island, so that his
food supply becomes a symbol of his survival. His securing of goat
meat staves off immediate starvation, and his discovery of grain
is viewed as a miracle, like manna from heaven. His cultivation
of raisins, almost a luxury food for Crusoe, marks a new comfortable
period in his island existence. In a way, these images of eating
convey Crusoe’s ability to integrate the island into his life, just
as food is integrated into the body to let the organism grow and
prosper. But no sooner does Crusoe master the art of eating than
he begins to fear being eaten himself. The cannibals transform Crusoe
from the consumer into a potential object to be consumed. Life for
Crusoe always illustrates this eat or be eaten philosophy,
since even back in Europe he is threatened by man-eating wolves.
Eating is an image of existence itself, just as being eaten signifies
death for Crusoe.
Ordeals at Sea
Crusoe’s encounters with water in the novel are often
associated not simply with hardship, but with a kind of symbolic
ordeal, or test of character. First, the storm off the coast of
Yarmouth frightens Crusoe’s friend away from a life at sea, but
does not deter Crusoe. Then, in his first trading voyage, he proves
himself a capable merchant, and in his second one, he shows he is
able to survive enslavement. His escape from his Moorish master
and his successful encounter with the Africans both occur at sea.
Most significantly, Crusoe survives his shipwreck after a lengthy
immersion in water. But the sea remains a source of danger and fear
even later, when the cannibals arrive in canoes. The Spanish shipwreck
reminds Crusoe of the destructive power of water and of his own
good fortune in surviving it. All the life-testing water imagery
in the novel has subtle associations with the rite of baptism, by
which Christians prove their faith and enter a new life saved by
Christ.
