William had struck so deep into my unthinking Temper, with hinting to me, that there was something beyond all this, that the present Time was the Time of Enjoyment, but that the Time of Account approached; that the Work that remain'd was gentler than the Labour past, viz. Repentance.
But even so, William proceeds to argue that there is no point in disposing of their wealth, and so, in the final few pages of the book, William and Captain Singleton become even richer by selling their goods, and Captain Singleton, upon returning to England, bestows on William's sister a sum of five thousand pounds and proceeds to marry her. The book's ending thus bestows on Captain Singleton rewards in excess of his act of repentance, which immediately precedes his homecoming. The mere fact of repentance does not determine the kind or quantity of reward that follows it.
The apparent effects of conscience upon Roxana's behavior are virtually nil. Such effects would be difficult to detect in any case, since Defoe's characteristic narrative form makes it hard to tell, as the narrator recounts her story, whether she felt pangs of conscience during the actual experiences or whether the intrusion of conscience is merely a reflection of the repentant and virtuous perspective from which she writes. Thus Roxana writes about the interventions of conscience at an important moment as though they are a series of gaps in her experience-as if she were thinking in formal terms about the condition of her own tale:
There was, and would be, Hours of Intervals, and of dark Reflections which came involuntarily in, and thrust in Sighs in the middle of all my Songs; and there would be, sometimes, a heaviness of Heart, which intermingl'd itself with all my Joy… Conscience will, and does, often break in upon [people] at particular times, let them do what they can do to prevent it.
Both the «repentant» Roxana and the Roxana in the midst of whoring and managing her wealth reflect on the character's experience in similar terms; and her reflection does little to alter the course of her career, which only suddenly and finally experiences a reversal-for completely mysterious reasons. -30-
The arbitrariness of assigning meanings to a sum of separate experiences-and the fact that such assignation reflects distinct cultural assumptions-is highlighted, especially in Robinson Crusoe and A Journal of the Plague Year, by the narrator's use of the Bible as a means to pin down and summarize his experience. With Robinson, this habit is persistent; he frequently flicks open the pages of the scriptures to reassure himself of the meaning of events that-for him as well as for his reader-might as well be a series of random occurrences. The narrative conditions under which this habit is recorded only heighten the reader's perception that the action is slightly desperate. About a third of the way through his account, Robinson has apparently switched from his direct narrative into a journal mode, but the entry for June 27 records Robinson sick with an ague. He first calls on God, 'Lord look upon me, Lord pity me, Lord have Mercy upon me'; then he falls asleep and has an apocalyptic dream in which a kind of revenging angel threatens him for having failed to repent; finally he is struck by his impiety and believes God (who is symbolically associated throughout with his father) is punishing him. In the course of his speculations (or 'Reflections') Robinson slips out of his journal, as if the fever and fear have marred the internal consistency of his subsequent record. Returning to the journal for June 28, Robinson begins to reconsider his relation to God on a grand scale, and finds himself 'struck dumb with these Reflections.' He immediately experiments with tobacco, which disturbs his head, and, intoxicated by its fumes, he 'open'd the Book casually,' to read these words: 'Call on me in the Day of Trouble, and I will deliver, and thou shalt glorify me.' Rather than interpreting the application of this injunction as adequate to the 'Case,' as Robinson calls it, we should remain conscious of the arbitrary relation between the biblical motto and what Robinson assumes it glosses, especially considering the cognitive dissonance that Robinson experiences at this juncture. Later, we find Robinson creating even more arbitrary connections between events when he says that it was on the same calendar date that he left his father and later went to sea, or that he was both born and saved from drowning on the thirtieth of September.
The entire plot of A Journal of the Plague Year is precipitated by the narrator's ('H. F.') gesture of turning the pages of the Bible, much as Robinson continually does. H. F. is unsure whether he should, like his brother, flee London as the plague mounts. He is most explicitly concerned about protecting his goods, but he then writes: -31-
This lay close to me, and my Mind seemed more and more encouraged to stay than ever, and supported with a secret Satisfaction, that I should be kept: Add to this that turning over the Bible, which lay before me, and while my Thoughts were more than ordinarily serious upon the Question, I cry'd out, WELL, I know not what to do, Lord direct me! and the like; and [at] that Juncture, I happen'd to stop turning over the Book at the 91 st Psalm, and casting my Eye on the second Verse, I read on to the 7th Verse exclusive.
Not only does the Bible supply these somewhat unsatisfactory means of justifying and glossing actions, but-Defoe seems to suggest-it is in the action of some biblical narratives themselves that we find a similar cryptic relationship between human experience, rendered via second causes, and the actions of the divine, which remain inscrutable. The chief figure of this narrative and historical conundrum is of course Job, whose afflictions strike him as disproportionate to divine action in the world as he understands it; and the problem of reconciling divine omniscience with human knowledge is never truly resolved in that book. It is for this reason, I suggest, that Job crops up as a kind of master plot for Robinson Crusoe: at the end of his story, Robinson writes, 'I might well say, now indeed, That the latter End of Job was better than the Beginning.' Colonel Jack is left at the end of his career in retirement or 'Exile,' where 'I had… leisure to reflect, and to repent, to call to mind things pass'd, and with a just Detestation, learn as Job says, to abhor my self in Dust and Ashes.' And Roxana's wanderings in the world begin as her husband leaves her with five children. She is comforted by Amy, an 'old Aunt,' and another woman, who 'sat down like Job's three Comforters, and said not one Word to me for a great while.' To align the events of ordinary life unequivocally with the motions of providence is, Defoe seems to say in A Journal of the Plague Year, 'Turkish predestinarianism.' We cannot, H. F. writes, see the plague as arising from anything but 'natural causes': though God can choose to work within 'the ordinary course of things,' our business is to attend to second rather than first causes, which are as obscure to us as the origins and essence of the plague itself.
Whereas the language of providence and of reflection attempts recursively to endow the details of the narrative with a total and harmonizing significance, Defoe's narratives also incorporate a language of anticipation, as if either the narrator-or Defoe-wants to assert control over the storytelling that is to come, which will in the course of time prove to have providential or at least formal significance. Given the -32- general roughness of Defoe's technique-some critics think he might have written Captain Singleton in great haste to capitalize on the success of Robinson Crusoe-such assurances of control seem more hopeful than otherwise. Further, in highlighting the contradiction between the narrator's predictions and the actual course of events, they are at odds with the sense that the outcome is consistently providential; that is, they seem to intensify rather than settle the problem of narrative control. This foreshadowing of future events is pervasive. 'I am hastening to my own story,' writes Colonel Jack; Roxana refers to the impending close of her story ('this End of my Story'); Moll says that she is 'too near the End of my Story'; characters commonly refer to some 'new scene' of their lives that is about to follow (immediately before coming across the footprint for the first time, Robinson writes, 'But now I come to a new Scene of my Life').
This internal and repetitive irony has two thematic implications that deserve mention. First, Defoe indulges the typical neoclassical fascination with forensics, which follows naturally from his interest in criminal life. When Moll is finally imprisoned for theft, her 'governess,' who acts as advisor and fence, tries to tamper with the evidence, but to no avail, since, it transpires, 'I was to have three Witnesses of Fact against me, the Master and his two Maids; that is to say, I was as certain to be cast for my Life, as it was certain that I was alive.' The point is that, finally, empirical knowledge prevails against the attempt to subvert it-though such attempts are repeatedly made by Defoe's characters who tell several versions of their stories to the reader and to other listeners in the tale. In contrast to Fielding's interpolated narratives, Defoe's tend to obscure or edit rather than confirm the certainty of some preexisting truth: critics have often pointed out that Robinson's journal changes the particulars of what we have hitherto been told. Roxana is hounded by a French Jew who tries to prove that she was not truly married to
