Critical studies of Robinson Crusoe have tended to treat the novel as a single-voiced discourse, focusing on one subject or another among those related to its various moral, religious, economic, political, and ideological themes. The time of great soc...
Critical studies of Robinson Crusoe have tended to treat the novel as a single-voiced discourse, focusing on one subject or another among those related to its various moral, religious, economic, political, and ideological themes. The time of great social change in which the story is set, however, makes it tempting, and rewarding, to discuss it as a text of heteroglossia. Close scrutiny reveals that the strength of the novel lies in its internal dialogic structure. Two opposing voices, attitudes, perspectives, and discursive forces engage in hidden polemics. Disputative dialogue centers around didactic, political, economic, or ideological issues, among others. In the final analysis, the two sides of dialogic interplay endorse respectively the status quo and change, stasis and flux, or being and becoming. One may well say that Robinson Crusoe is a Bakhtinian double-voiced discourse par excellence.