"Some Such Thoughts as These Occurred to Me"

Wikipedia has been kind enough to offer me the following distinction: “First-person narrations may be told . . . in the guise of a person experiencing the events in the story without being aware of conveying that experience to an audience; on the other hand, the narrator may be conscious of telling the story to a given audience, perhaps at a given place and time, for a given reason.”  I fell to “wikipediaing” first-person narration for these nuances while reading Robinson Crusoe because of its relevance to my willingness to rely on Crusoe as a narrator.  In fact, after reading Crusoe this time around, the difference between a first-person narrator who presents his or her journey to a reader as it unfolds and one who relates his or experiences only after they are complete seems so significant that I am extremely surprised to be unable to find common, distinct names for these respective types of narration.    

Evan R. Davis, in his introduction to the text, notes, in regards to Crusoe’s oft vacillating actions and suppositions, that there are “few apologies for his quick turns of mind.  Crusoe regrets his actions and thoughts frequently enough, but rarely in a terribly sustained way” (31).  As Crusoe’s narration is ostensibly of the latter kind of the two types of first-person narration aforementioned, such oscillation seems rather nonsensical; if Crusoe is relating to us the nature and effects of his twenty-eight years stranded on a remote island only after these years have passed, then should not his ultimate reflections upon his time there be relatively stable?  One perhaps easy way to reconcile this troubling aspect of the novel is through Defoe’s inclusion of Crusoe’s journal, the effect of which, as Davis asserts, is to create “moments when it becomes impossible to know whether we are reading the journal or a later commentary” (23).  I think, however, that there is more to it than this. 

When I first began exploring this idea, I was convinced that, as I went back through my annotations of the novel, I would find many examples of moments when the rescued Crusoe, relating his Strange and Surprising Adventures after this first round of them is over, would offer contradictory bits of wisdom directly to his reader.  I was surprised to find such contradiction in only a few aspects of his narration.  More striking was the fact that, when Crusoe makes strong statements such as “It is God that has made it all” and “[T]his was the Station of Life the infinitely wise and good providence of God had determin’d for me” and “How wonderfully we are deliver’d, when we know nothing of it,” they are usually prefaced with such introductions as “[S]ome such thoughts as these occurred to me . . . ” and “I considered that this was . . . ” and “This renew’d a Contemplation, which often had come to my Thoughts in former Time . . . ” (124; 179; 194).  In short, instead of offering his reader those reflections that could be borne only from the whole of his experience, Crusoe primarily offers us, in his narration, a linear presentation of the thoughts of his less experienced, younger self.  My question in observing this is simply why, then, Defoe chose to construct the novel from the point of view of one so uniquely experienced as the aged Crusoe if his reader cannot then benefit from the wisdom ostensibly gleaned from this experience?  Without the advantage of this perspective, why not simply have Crusoe relate his story “in the guise of a person experiencing the events in the story”?  What does it mean that the Crusoe writing at the end of these adventures is so careful to attribute his earlier conclusions to his earlier thought processes?   One of my many last, lingering thoughts is that somewhere in Robinson Crusoe, an unreliable narrator may be afoot.  (No pun intended.)