It will interesting to compare the role of time in Crusoe to the telescoping of time in Grace Abounding.
Both narratives have an extremely interior feel to me, despite Crusoe’s busy manipulation of the island…I find that time is hard to keep track of in Defoe just as it is in Bunyan’s book.
tahns said
I think in Defoe what complicates the issue is that the narrator will write about a certain period of time and then in a sense rewrite that time period in a journal entry (and of course the details often don’t exactly match up). It’s interesting to step back and think about what it means to narrate in a journal entry versus ‘regular’ narrative form. Journal entries tend to be very specific in terms of time– as they are often headed with a date and it’s clear that the writer wrote the entry often all at once and on the same day. But at the same time, that almost serves to make time somewhat surreal when an entry covers something that happened not on that exact day.
That’s not totally clear, but I think you get the general idea…
carriehintz said
It might be interesting to compare Defoe’s technique of using retrospection in the journal to Richardson’s use of “writing to the moment”–where we see characters writing in their journals about events that are happening right then and there…