First Stanza

Religion plays a tremendous role in the first stanza of "Crusoe's Journal."  Biblical imagery and references abound, as the narrator describes the land as a paradise not unlike the garden of Eden: it is "perched between ocean and green, churning forest," truly a lush "green world."  The narrator also seems to connect Crusoe to Adam.  This is ironic, however, as Adam truly was the first inhabitant of Eden, and Crusoe stumbles upon an Eden that is already inhabited.  Both, however, establish themselves as masters of their surroundings.  Adam ruled over Eve and the beasts, and Crusoe over the "good Fridays" already inhabiting the island.  There is another example of irony in the stanza when the narrator speaks of the natives' conversion to Christianity: they are "converted cannibals" that have been taught to "eat the flesh of Christ."  In this sense, if viewed through a postcolonial perspective, the narrator undermines the supposed civilizing influence of Western Christianity and exposes its nonsensical doctrines.  To extend the postcolonial analysis even further, the narrator speaks of the mimicry by the natives of the colonizing culture, and also the resulting hybridity due to the mixing of the two cultures, when he writes "parroting our master's style and voice, we make his language ours."