Chapter 1
"I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family..." The iconic opening that establishes Crusoe's bourgeois English origins and the memoir's first-person voice.
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From Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
The novel opens with Crusoe's autobiographical voice introducing his family origins and his father's middle-station philosophy, establishing the memoir form and the central tension between filial duty and wanderlust.
Chapter 1
The father's speech on the middle station of life as the happiest condition, which Crusoe's disobedience violates and which he repeatedly recalls as prophetic.
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