SOURCE: "Robinson Crusoe: A Miserable and Almost Hopeless Condition," in Defoe's Perpetual Seekers: A Study of Major Fiction, Bucknell University Press, 1985, pp. 24-49.

In the following excerpt, Birdsall discusses Crusoe's realization that there can be no wholly successful defense against the human predicament of living in a hostile world.

… Robinson Crusoe is indeed a success story of the sort several recent critics have described. Crusoe becomes master of his fate, bending even God or Providence to his will. He is a victorious rebel against restriction. He controls his circumstances. But in thinking of our actual experience of the adventures of Robinson Crusoe, we must surely acknowledge something a little wrong about all this. For if we take Crusoe's early and continuing defiance of his limitations to have a symbolic suggestiveness, we come abruptly to an inescapable realization about Crusoe's pursuit of absolute power—namely, that it is destined...