The most notable strategy employed by Stevenson in this novel is the use of the "naive narrator" for most of the text. Jim Hawkins is young, impressionable, and human, but he is not stupid. Thus, he tells the story in a lively, relatively simple manner. This effect makes the perhaps excessively dramatic events in the plot more believable. Some of the plot is related by Dr. Livesy (those events which Jim could not witness), and it is to Stevenson's credit that these passages are written in a style befitting an older, more sophisticated speaker.

While the principal appeal of the book has always been its story line, Stevenson's evocation of setting, whether at the Admiral Benbow Inn and its environs, the good ship Hispaniola, or the island itself, is remarkable.

Many readers may be familiar with the fact that the origin of the story was a map that...