18. "After Friday and I became."
"After Friday and I became." through ".every necessary Thing as before" (pages 160-166)
Crusoe inducts Friday "into the Mystery" of marksmanship. He also tells Friday about Europe and England, and about his own shipwreck, at which account Friday tells Crusoe that he, Friday, has seen a similar shipwreck, from which some seventeen European sailors survived and are living on the mainland. Crusoe begins to form an idea of going to the mainland to find these sailors. To that end, he has Friday help him build a boat. As the twenty-seventh year of his exile begins, Crusoe believes his deliverance is closer than ever.
Analysis
This section further emphasizes Friday as the "noble savage"-that is, an idealized representative of humanity in its "natural" state: "every thing he said was so Honest, and so Innocent. I could not suspect him of Deceit." Friday is so compelling a figure-in the text and in subsequent popular imagination-that the noted Printing and the Mind of Man exhibit catalogue remarked, Defoe portrayed "the 'noble savage' in a way that made the book required reading for Rousseau's Emile [his 1762 novel that depicts the ideal training for a fictional child]" (John Carter and Percy Muir, eds., Printing and the Mind of Man, London: Cassell, 1967, p. 107). Because the character of Friday is one element that consistently survives abridgment and adaptation, he has done much to keep the "noble savage" archetype alive in Western literature and creative arts. In this section in particular, Friday embodies the dream of imperial powers: to perpetuate their own way of life on others. Friday tells Crusoe that, were he to return to his own people on the mainland, he would "tell them to live Good, tell them to pray God." In other words, he would replicate the ideal European society of which Crusoe has told him.
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