"So far as I can tell, no narrator in realistic prose fiction before H. F. [the narrator of A Journal of the Plague Year] reveals this type of general sympathy for the human condition. I do not find it in those fictions of Defoe influenced by picaresque models. In Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack there is too much of a concern with self and individual experience to have the kind of combination of sympathy and detachment to be found in H. F. And the same may said of "poor Robinson Crusoe," as the parrot calls Defoe's castaway. Crusoe obviously has to teach his parrot to repeat that self-pitying title. Like Fielding's humane historian, H. F. resists all temptation to blame and scold. He is the invention of a moment in English history when Defoe wanted to spread feelings of hope and charity. In the process, he set a pattern for fictional narrators that has been central to the development of the novel."
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Novelists from EnglandEssayists from EnglandChildren's authorsSatirists from EnglandJournalists from England
Original Language: English
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Sources
Maximillian E. Novak, 'Defoe and the Disordered City', PMLA, Vol. 92, No. 2 (March 1977), p. 250
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Daniel_Defoe
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