T Defoe's Pattern: Adversity Versus Freedom

Throughout Defoe's novels perceived may well be such a pattern of the plot form: adversity and hardship to liberation and freedom, by which revealed is the conflict between the destructive environment and vehement subjective reactions, and also depicted are such gloomy scenes as that disasters lie everywhere while survival and salvation in most cases is at most merely tantalizing. Although researches on Defoe has been quite mature and fruitful, yet it is hardly, if ever, seen to explore the ideological and historical values of such plot-patterns and incident-types. That accounts the motivaton for having chosen this as this thesis'topic, focusing on such patterns but from vast and various perspectives—narratological, typological, literally historical, and ethnically ideological.Three types as variations of the same patter as such have been further classified: conflict between Man and Nature, Man and Man, and, between the Man and Himself, which, against the historical backgrounds and amidst such social auras as political and cultural, reports about the configuration of society and the alternation of evaluation-standards, and also stirred a number of issues attached to this pattern, such as the ethnical, instrumental, patriarchal, egoistic, and the modernistic that was predicted artistically, by around 200 years, by our Daniel Defoe as Time's herald.