Ageing and the Attainment of Form in Robinson Crusoe

The early novel, especially when it is shaped as an autobiography, is on one level the account of a quest for form. The protagonist's life may be seen as an existential journey through the chaos and fragmentariness of disparate, apparently unrelated, events and encounters. The exact map and destination of such a journey can only be identified retrospectively, when the protagonist reaches its conclusion. Thus, rather than a phase of decay and loss, old age -- as happens in Yeats's poem, Sailing to Byzantium -- becomes a time of transcendence and transfguration.