The 1719 novel The Life and Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe, the story of a man trying to survive on a South Pacific island, is based on a true story about Alexander Selkirk, who in 1704 asked to be placed on a remote island and then picked up five years later. Crusoe, of course, found a man Friday and had to escape headhunters. The story, the first English novel ever written, has inspired some forty films over the years. In 1937, Amelia Earhart disappeared while flying solo in the South Pacific; there is some evidence that her plane landed on the remote, uninhabited Pacific atoll of Nikumarorono, so she might have lived and died a Robinson Crusoe existence. The two stories doubtless provide some inspiration for Cast Away, directed by Robert Zemeckis. Chuck Noland (played by Tom Hanks) is the sole survivor of a Federal Express plane that crashes in the Pacific somewhere near the Cook Islands; he is washed ashore on an uninhabited island (the filming is at Monuriki, Fiji), where he survives for approximately four years, deriving much of his will to live from a photo of his wife Kelly. Most of the film focuses on how he survives, physically as well as psychologically. Boy Scout skills are put to good use as he finds food and shelter. Although he suffers from coral and wood cuts as well as an infected tooth, his main battle is to stave off dehydration and starvation. At one point, he prepares to hang himself, but he demurs. His only dialog is with "Wilson," a face that he paints, at first on a volleyball from among the FedEx wreckage that washes up on the beach and then on a coconut. Finally, he builds a makeshift raft, intent on using ocean currents to carry him back to civilization. After a perilous journey, an ocean liner finally rescues him. When he returns to Memphis, hoping to restart his life with Kelly (played by Helen Hunt), he learns that she has in the meantime married Jerry Lovett (played by Chris Noth) and already has given birth to a daughter. The stoicism of his four-year ordeal carries over to his acceptance of the reality that he is again cast away. Although on the island he ripped open FedEx packages, looking for food or tools, one was never touched. At the end of the film, he delivers that package to the addressee at an isolated house somewhere in Texas. Then he goes back to the main dirt highway, looking at a map. Where will he now go? The film ends before we know the answer. Cast Away is a paradigm for those who have to cope with physical and psychological disaster, reminding us that the will to live is based on the simple truth in John Donne's poem, written about a century before Defoe's novel, though published posthumously, "No man is an island, entire of itself . . . any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." MH

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Robinson Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe relates the tale of an English sailor marooned on a desert island for nearly three decades. An ordinary man struggling to survive in extraordinary circumstances, Robinson Crusoe wrestles with fate and the nature of God.