Narrow Horizon

“Growing old on his island kingdom with no one to say him nay had so narrowed his horizon-when the horizon all around us was so vast and majestic!” (13)

            This quotation from the beginning of Foe immediately reminded me of the overarching theme in The Things They Carried and Cat’s Cradle; that truth is all about the eye of the beholder. We learn from Vonnegut and O’Brien that experience is stronger than the happening truth. The way someone conducts themselves based upon their perspective creates a truth that is unique to the individual despite how someone else in the same situation would experience this. Truths can be contradictory. Truth is relative.

While we know little about Cruso thus far, we know from Susan that he is intensely isolated on this island and she therefore claims he has a narrow perspective on the world. Without the large sampling of opinions and viewpoints that one would receive when living in a community, the truths about his life are rarely disputed or evaluated. We have no idea what he knows or believes to know but while Susan may have one set of truths, communicating with Cruso is immediately difficult because of his unyielding opinions. Cruso believes he knows all there is to know about the world which Susan dismisses since her world is more vast than the world he knows. We cannot take away from Cruso that he knows all there is to know about the world because it is relative to him and what is relative to him is all that is useful. Insight from Susan about life beyond Cruso’s horizon is irrelevant to his perspective, which Susan concludes is “indifference to salvation, and habit, and stubbornness of old age” (14).