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Example research essay topic: Time And Spiritual Transcendence In Crusoe - 1,116 words

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In The Rise of the Novel Ian Watt says of capitalism in English Society it is, at least, generally agreed that the foundations of the new order were laid in that period immediately following the Glorious Revolution (61). Defoe, a denizen of the new economic structure, was one of its unabashed supporters. Though in Robinson Crusoe he created an island far removed from Western society, it was used as a stage to expound the virtues of both Western religion and capitalist economics. Michele Tournier the midst of the reign of capitalism in English (and most of Western) society shrewdly uses the same setting to launch an explicit critique of the strange dogma thats evolved of the amalgam of Puritan religion with those capitalist economics, since the times of Defoe. Friday begins much the same as Robinson Crusoe, but quickly veers from that plotting, tracing the evolution of a man who ironically, through the weight of extreme seclusion transcends the individualistic and isolationist tendencies of his casino-puritan social inheritance and finds a superior spirituality through Friday, a character who represents in many instances the opposite of Western thinking. Stamped in the template of the work is a clearly delineated spiritual journey one fraught with systematic reversals, failures and regressions for every step gained in the direction of transcendence.

The atavistic instinct to survive leads Crusoe to an overzealous grasp for control, which eventually manifests itself in an ugly preoccupation with dominance [survival&# 8594; control &# 8594; dominance]. Dichotomously, the natural instinct for self-preservation leads to his obsession with accumulation, which is eventually corrupted into a fascination with greed [self-preservation&# 8594; accumulation&# 8594; greed]. Ironically, nearly three centuries after Robinsons fictional birth, Tournier's work uses the very Crusoe myth to expose the debilitating limitations of the religion economic and spiritual panegyrized by Defoe. Through the latter-day Crusoes journey, Tournier shows that ineluctably linked with the vices of consumer accumulation and avarice in the Western mindset are tenets that call for the parallel accumulation and preservation of time. This thought pattern both leads-to and is born of the Western model of time, one uniquely possessing of a past and a future in a linear, not circular configuration paradigm that gives birth to the (absurd) notion that time can be stored or accumulated.

It is not till Crusoe learns through Friday to live in the moment that he is freed of the derisive effects of the pattern of thought that holds time as a commodity, like land and people, to be acquired and conquered. It takes Crusoe the better part of 28 years to learn to live in times eternal component the moment. Also known as the present in the Western time paradigm, the moment is perpetually happening; it never stops and presumably never will stop is, by definition, eternity. The past, on the other hand, is forever gone and the future is something that will never arrive (the closest one will ever come is the present they are considering). Through Friday, Crusoe transcends the prison of the linear time line, thus finding eternity. Through his spiritual journey it becomes clear that the same neurotic preoccupation with accumulation that has metamorphosed in his Western mind from survival pang to neuroses was responsible for his decades-long hang-up.

On a parallel tract, his obsessions with the domination of both his surroundings and of time are inextricably bound with his religion; those obsessions and preoccupations his neuroses are directly linked to debilitating patterns of behavior stemming from the Bible and his reverence of the capitalistic virtue of commodity. From the beginning, signs of Crusoes Puritanical preoccupation with work are manifest. In his fight with the despair that solitude has saddled him with, hes afforded a respite during his work on the Escape. He had only the vaguest idea of the passing of time (Tournier 30), something that would more likely be ascribed to Friday. Immediately after that, however, Tournier writes every morning he had the sensation of starting again on the day before (Tournier 30). That notion, though freed of preoccupation with the future, is encumbered with an inherent regard for accumulation.

Two steps forward his disinterest in the passing of time and disregard for the future are marked by a step bathe unconscious and inexorable drive to acquire, to horde (time). Despair sets in again after the debacle with the grounded Escape and Crusoe is driven to the mirth antithesis of the result- and accumulation-based thinking of both Puritan religion and capitalist economics. The mire, by demonstrating his capacity for turning inward upon himself and withdrawing from the external world, had shown him that he had inherited more than he thought from that little draper [his father] in York (Tournier 41), Tournier writes, an explicit depiction of those two corrosive fall-outs of Western religious thinking individualism and self-punishment as inherited social constructs. If the boat and the promise of escape had been symptomatic of Crusoes total subordination of life in the present to salvation in the future, writes Anthony Purdy, the episode of the mud-hole represents a more subtle and perverse coupling of Puritanism and capitalism in a moral philosophy cum political economy of time (Purdy 185). Shortly after the scene depicting the mire, Tournier writes: Only the past had any worth or existence deserving of note.

The present was valueless except as the repository of memories accumulated in the past, and to add to that increasing fund was the only reason for living. In the end came death; and death itself was no more than the long-awaited moment when this treasure might be wholly enjoyed. Eternity was bestowed on us so that we might relive our life in death, more observantly, more intelligently, and more sensually than was possible in the turmoil of the present (Tournier 41). The passage demonstrates Crusoes inability to effectively deal with the Western time schematic.

An indulgent preoccupation with the past, and the future that the Western mind marks with death, are both preferable to the present which is described as a chaotic inconvenience. Not long after, Tournier announces Crusoe cut off from the human calendar (Tournier 47), the first sign of an awakening his transcendence. His first journal entry, however, shows him entrenched in the same Western mindset with which he entered the island: My victory is the moral order. Merely to survive is to die. It is a matter of building, organizing, ordering, patiently and without cease. Every pause is a backward step, a step toward the mire. (Tournier 51 - 52) Here again is the Western preoccupation with nervous activity and the neurotic need for continuous forward movement towards the future all the while exerting control of the external world.

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