Character
Robinson Crusoe spends twenty-eight years on an island off the coast of Venezuela with his talking parrot Poll, his pet dog, and a tame goat as his only companions. In his twenty-fourth year, he discovers that Carib cannibals occasionally use a desolate beach on the island to kill and eat their captives.
Crusoe observes one of the Caribs, kept captive and about to be eaten, escape his captors. Crusoe ambushes two pursuers, and the others leave in their canoes without the knowledge of their counterparts' outcome. The rescued captive bows in gratitude to Crusoe, who decides to employ him as a servant. He names him Friday after the weekday upon which the rescue takes place.
Crusoe describes Friday as being a Native American, though very unlike the Indians of Brazil and Virginia. His religion involves the worship of a mountain god named Benamuckee, officiated over by high priests called Oowokakee. Friday tolerates cannibalism, and even suggests eating the men Crusoe has killed.
Crusoe teaches Friday the English language and converts him to Christianity. He tells him that cannibalism is wrong. Friday accompanies him in an ambush in which they save Friday's father.
Crusoe returns to England twenty-eight years after being shipwrecked on the island, and four years after rescuing Friday. Friday's father goes with a Spanish castaway to the mainland to retrieve fourteen other Spanish castaways, but Crusoe and Friday depart the island before they return.
Friday accompanies Crusoe home to England, and is his companion in the sequel The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, in which Friday is killed in a sea battle.
In Jules Verne's L'École des Robinsons, the castaways rescue an African Negro on their island who says his name is Carefinotu. T. Artelett proposes to call him Mercredi ("Wednesday"), "as it is always done in the islands with Robinsons," but his master Godfrey prefers to keep the original name.
Read more about this topic: Friday (fictional Character)
Famous quotes containing the word character:
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Have you not budged an inch, then? Such is the daily news. Its facts appear to float in the atmosphere.... We should wash ourselves clean of such news. Of what consequence, though our planet explode, if there is no character involved in the explosion? In health we have not the least curiosity about such events. We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I wasn’t born to be a fighter. I was born with a gentle nature, a flexible character and an organism as equilibrated as it is judged hysterical. I shouldn’t have been forced to fight constantly and ferociously. The causes I have fought for have invariably been causes that should have been gained by a delicate suggestion. Since they never were, I made myself into a fighter.”
—Margaret Anderson (1886–1973)