Map of Robinson Crusoe's Voyage
This storymap provides a chronological view of Crusoe's travels that he recounts in the novel. The map includes the locations to which he travels alongside his commentary about these locales that Crusoe provides in the narrative. Each of these points depicted in this storymap, of course, is not an exact, regular increment—sometimes mere days separate Crusoe's travels to a given location, and sometimes decades. To get a grasp of the timeline of events in the novel, see the interactive timeline of events in Robinson Crusoe.
Though the island onto which Crusoe washes up is the locus of the narrative and occupies the most narrative time in the novel (as well as in the character Crusoe's life, as he spends 28 years upon the island), the island's location is not fixed in the novel. The reader is informed that the island is located somewhere in the Caribbean—a noted departure from Defoe's real-life castaway inspirations—but a specific island (either real or fictional) is never named. This indeterminacy is a narrative technique that establishes realism in the novel—though Defoe sometimes achieves this realism through copious detail and lengthy enumerated lists, essential to this vision of realism are moments of purposeful omission and textual absence. The unstated location of island increases the aura of mystery surrounding Crusoe's narrative, and its lack of a real-world referent allows Defoe to craft an original glimpse of an island with characteristics fitting its approximate location without being too tethered to space and place.