What basic points are to be considered while writing an essay on the theme of Individuality in Robinson Crusoe?

Throughout the novel, Crusoe longs to fulfill his own
individuality. From the very beginning of the novel, Crusoe feels the need to emancipate
himself from the authority of family tradition. Robinson suffers for the constraints put
upon him by his family milieu and his “head began to be filled very early with rambling
thoughts”. He is completely alienated from the mercantile class to which his father and
his family belong, although, in the course of the novel, he will come to embody those
very values of economic profitability (including the profitability of the slave trade)
that he had rejected at the beginning.

An important point
to make is that Crusoe’s yearn for freedom is predicated upon the enslavement of others.
The novel celebrates Crusoe’s individual agency and his ability to manipulate and
domesticate the exotic locales and the exotic people, or “savages” as he defines them,
that he encounters in the course of his adventures. Thanks to his resourcefulness,
Crusoe prospers on the desert island where he is shipwrecked, especially in the area of
farming and raising sheep. Crusoe also succeeds in civilizing Friday, the savage he
saves from a cannibalistic ritual. The novel thus presents Crusoe’s entrepreneurial
spirit and becomes a strong contribution to the argument for the civilizing mission of
Europeans in foreign and far-away lands.

As the
South-African Nobel-Prize novelist J. M. Coetzee writes in his introduction to the
novel: “Robinson Crusoe is unabashed propaganda for the extension
of British mercantile power in the New World and the establishment of new British
colonies” (1999 ix). Defoe’s narrative inextricably links the enslavement of savages,
the advancement of European colonization and of Christianity and the financial and
economic progress of its prototypical capitalist main character.