Abstract
Daniel Defoe was one of the greatest novelists in the history of English literature in the 18th-century, and his masterpiece "Robinson Crusoe" was pretty well-known and very widely spread, which had a significant influence on English literature. The novel was based on a true story and Defoe has made it into novel. In 1704 Scottish sailor Purcell Cork quarreled with the captain at sea, and then the captain abandoned him on a deserted island until being rescued four years later. Purcell Cork had not done anything worthy of praise or any heroic deeds on that deserted island. However, Defoe had shaped a totally new character called Robinson who had become the new “hero”. And Robinson was the frist idealized image of Western literature the emerging bourgeois. There were many people had done lots of research on Robinson, but they often ignore another hero in the novel. As his servant Friday emerging in the latter part of the story actually played an important role on driving the whole story forward and making the features of the hero Robinson more full. This paper is aim to do a research on the significance of Friday. Actually, they are the symbol of colonizing and being colonized and what they did for each other is the process and miniature of expansion of capitalism and colonialism. From my view, it is necessary to do this research in order that we can understand the whole novel from a different perspective. This paper was based on the latter part when Friday emerged and to be concluded by comparison between Robinson and Friday employing the theory of capitalism and colonialism. The key point is about the complementary relationship in the process of the expansion of capitalism and capitalism.
According to this, I hope to help other researchers acknowledge more about the true attitude of the people in that time towards to the expansion of capitalism and why the author praised the expansion of capitalism and colonialism from another perspective. Friday is such an important role to get this aim as the the colonized one who was the real reflection of the colonialism. In this dissertation, I hope provide a new path for the literature research from the view of sub-hero, such as why the working-class people that time supported the expansion of capitalism and colonialism.
Key words: significance, symbol, complementary, capitalism, colonialism
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