As the bond between Crusoe and Friday becomes stronger,
the similarities between the two men’s cultures gain more importance than
their differences. Crusoe is struck by the ease with which Friday
learns about the Christian God, finding a close resemblance with
the native’s own deity Benamuckee. Friday is less able to understand
the devil, but it is soon revealed that Crusoe does not understand
him perfectly either, when Crusoe admits that he has more “sincerity
than knowledge” in the subject of religious instruction. Crusoe
first believes the savages to be wicked, but we soon learn that the
cannibals have shown an almost Christian charity in saving seventeen
European men from the shipwreck. Moreover, Chapter XXVII, with its
mutiny and scheduled execution, reminds us that Europeans kill their
own kind too, just like Friday’s people. The coincidental numerical
equivalence between the eleven savages arriving in Crusoe’s dream
in Chapter XXII and the eleven Europeans now arriving after the
mutiny is Defoe’s method of emphasizing the similarities between
natives and Europeans. Both groups can be violent and murderous,
yet both groups can also produce individuals—like Crusoe and Friday—who
are kind and good. Generalizing them into the good and the bad,
or the civilized and the wild, proves impossible.
Crusoe’s story, which has until now been mainly about
his own individual survival, takes on a strong political and national
dimension when Crusoe wonders whether he can trust the other sixteen Spaniards—who
are, historically, often enemies of the British—as his comrades-in-arms
against the cannibals. Ironically, it turns out that he can trust
these foreigners much more than he can his own countrymen, the eight
English mutineers he encounters later. Furthermore, the two non-European
cannibal “nations,” as Friday terms them, enlarge this national
dimension. Friday explains that the cannibals do not eat each other
randomly, but that each nation eats only its enemy. Therefore, those
cannibalistic actions that seem steeped in savagery are in fact
governed by political motives. In Chapter XXV, Crusoe is reluctant
to kill the cannibals until he reasons that Friday is in a state
of war, thus making murder permissible. This nationalist thinking
permeates Crusoe’s language too. As usual, our hero’s vocabulary
reveals much about how he imagines his role on the island, and he
starts to describe himself as “generalissimo” of an “army,” with
Friday as his “lieutenant-general.” No longer a mere castaway, Crusoe
now openly refers to himself as a national leader of military forces.
When he refers to his two new guests on the island as his “subjects,”
we sense how deeply ingrained his imagined national role as king
of the island has become.
