A vessel perishes on the rocks, and a literary legend is born.Robinson Crusoe is a tale of survival. The desert island is a test of self-sufficiency. Crusoe's Eden and enemy, his Utopia and his prison. House, clothing, tools, and attitudes are made for this new world, with a little help from the wreck of the old. Crusoe becomes a bourgeois on an island, and builds a country house. And in this new world he finds a true innocent, a Good Friday. As Providence supplies a companion, so at last it permits release: Crusoe escapes from island to munificence, taking Friday with him. Deliverance or perdition? Adventure story or spiritual allegory? The reader too must make what he or she can of Defoe's island.