The idea of the young adult abandoned on a desert island is one that has been propagated throughout history. I think every generation has a book, which most captures the spirit of the remuneration of the story, and for me, and I imagine many students about my age, it was Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet. As I read Crusoe I was reminded not only of my own relationship with Hatchet, but the inspiration Paulsen clearly could have drawn from Crusoe. To fill you in concisely, Hatchet tells the story of a young boy whose travelling on a small plane that crashes. The pilot is killed, and the boy must survive on the island alone with only the Hatchet his mother had given him as a present, which he does for two months before he is rescued (although there are sequels that explore what would have happened if he was not rescued, and had to survive the winter etc.). When I first read Hatchet in the sixth grade, I strongly empathized with this boy stranded in the wild, and also was enthralled by the concept of his survival. It begged the question, would I be able to make it? How would I endure? I find Hatchet more successful, perhaps not in terms of great literature, but because it moves much more quickly and involves a more comprehensible time period, two months is much easier to fathom than 18 years, and it refrains from the listing and diary activity throughout Crusoe. As I had made the connection to Hatchet early in the text, I became cognizant of when Crusoe employed the Hatchet, which was quite frequently. For example, when he goes to explore the island, he considers the hatchet to be one of his most essential tools. “I now resolved to travel quite across to the sea-shore on that side; so, taking my gun, a hatchet, and my dog…”. When he marvels at his own accomplishments, he is impressed by his use of the hatchet, which although simple allowed him to create many things. “However, I made an abundance of things with no more tools than an adze and a hatchet which perhaps were never made that way before, and that with infinite labour”. Furthermore, when he decides to give Friday a hatchet, because, as he states “I gave him a hatchet, which was not only as good a weapon in some cases, but much more useful upon other occasions.” The tool hatchet has inspired adventure writers across time as a multipurpose utensil of survival, and is beloved both in Defoe and Paulsen.
