“I know your’e a slave and all and, at that, I was even a slave for a moment, but ahh I have had a terrible few days. Here, let me set my tired foot upon your head.”

“Me, me, me” is the title of the world Crusoe lives in.  Despite having all available means to help him not only survive in life, but essentially thrive luxuriously in life, Crusoe still breaks into a tantrum, claiming that he needs to get away as it was divinely assigned for him to do so: “I would be satisfied with nothing but going to sea, and my inclination to this led me so strongly against the will…”(1).

Crusoe, like the picture, wants to be seen as an unselfish man who only seeks to find meaning in the world, but ironically seems to only appear as the self-serving well-to-do of a man who he grew up as.  Totally undermining the life of slaves, and despite he himself experienced being one, still finds a way to make his predicament  seem perfectly designed by God, “I was perfectly overwhelmed, and now I look’d back upon my father’s prophetik discourse to me, that i should be miserable….that now the hand of Heaven had over taken me”(13).  As one can see, though he understands the misery of being enslaved, we later come to learn that he not only gets a slave or two himself, but sells them as if they were merely property.  Property, like the head he has bestowed his foot upon, in the picture.

Like I stated above, Crusoe talks a lot about himself, but he also talks about God repeatedly throughout the text; always eluding to the notion that God is causing all the bad that is happening to him.  In my mind, all I see is a man who is playing make believe, and using his power as an Englishman to utilize natives, of the lands he has visited, as props for his make believe world.

Once he is settled on the island, he becomes lost on, he describes his surroundings, “Then to see how like a king I din’d too, all alone, attended by my servants”(108).  This shows two things we see in the picture below: that he has a ridiculous sense of grandeur, and that he does not consider non-English people -such as the natives- as people.  The world he lives in is the worst scenario of make believe I have ever seen.

-Maricela Martinez (Marcy)