Unlock the more straightforward side of Friday with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of Friday by Michel Tournier, a retelling of Daniel Defoe’s classic novel Robinson Crusoe. Like Defoe’s 1719 novel, Friday recounts the adventures of Robinson Crusoe after he is shipwrecked on a desert island, where he eventually comes into contact with a young native whom he dubs “Friday”, after the day they met. Although Robinson initially considers Friday an inferior, like in Defoe’s novel, he eventually develops a deep respect and friendship for him, and casts off the trappings of civilisation to live in harmony with nature. Michel Tournier was a French writer who won a number of prestigious literary prizes, including the Prix Goncourt, and was elected to the Académie française in 1972. Find out everything you need to know about Friday in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: • A complete plot summary • Character studies • Key themes and symbols • Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you in your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!

In this volume, Ian Watt examines the myths of Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan and Robinson Crusoe, as the distinctive products of modern society. He traces the way the original versions of Faust, Don Quixote and Don Juan - all written within a forty-year period during the Counter Reformation - presented unflattering portrayals of the three figures, while the Romantic period two centuries later recreated them as admirable and even heroic. The twentieth century retained their prestige as mythical figures, but with a new note of criticism. Robinson Crusoe came much later than the other three, but his fate can be seen as representative of the new religious, economic and social attitudes which succeeded the Counter-Reformation. The four figures help to reveal problems of individualism in the modern period: solitude, narcissism, and the claims of the self versus the claims of society. They all pursue their own view of what they should be, raising strong questions about their heroes' character and the societies whose ideals they reflect.

A highly praised novel—now in a new paperback edition Friday, winner of the 1967 Grand Prix du Roman of the Académie Française, is a sly, enchanting retelling of the legend of Robinson Crusoe by the man the New Yorker calls "France's best and probably best-known writer." Cast away on a tropical island, Michel Tournier's god-fearing Crusoe sets out to tame it, to remake it in the image of the civilization he has left behind. Alone and against incredible odds, he almost succeeds. Then a mulatto named Friday appears and teaches Robinson that there are, after all, better things in life than civilization.

In the evening of September 29, 1759, a cargo ship runs aground and is wrecked in a storm. There is only one survivor, a young Englishman travelling to South America to seek his fortune. This is the ultimate desert island story - a tale of one man's struggle to survive on an untamed island.

Jean and Paul are identical twins. Outsiders, even their parents, cannot tell them apart, and call them Jean-Paul. When Jean rebels against their unity and deserts his brother, Paul sets out to follow him in a pilgrimage that leads all around the world, through places that reflect their separation.

Michel Tournier's Eleazar, Exodus to the West is a modern successor to two seemingly disparate myths-the biblical adventure of the Exodus and the nineteenth-century myth of the American frontier. The setting is 1845. Eleazar, a Protestant minister, leaves his native Ireland with his wife and two children to emigrate to America. Like the Old Testament Moses, with whom Eleazar comes to identify through the course of the novel, Eleazar has committed a justifiable murder and is forced to leave his home. After landing in Virginia, the family travels west toward what Eleazar believes is the Promised Land of California. While in the Colorado desert, however, he experiences a profound epiphany. He understands for the first time how the prophet Moses was tragically torn between fire and water: between the burning bush, with its power to bring him into contact with the voice of Yahweh, and the banal demands of the Hebrew people in exile, who depended on him to touch his stick to the rock and bring forth water. Eleazar, Exodus to the West parallels the lives of the two misfits-the Irish minister in the American West and the Hebrew Moses in exile in the desert after leaving Egypt. Tournier sets before us timeless issues and tantalizing questions from our mythological past: Moses' personality and peculiar relationship with God, fundamental contradictions between the Old and the New Testaments, and our own intimate bond with the eternal symbols of fire and water.

Friday is a secret courier and ardent lover. Employed by a man she only knows of as "Boss," she is given the most awkward and dangerous cases, which take her from New Zealand to Canada, and through the new States of America's disunion, all the way out into the stars and the new colony of Botany Bay. Thrust into one calamity after another, she uses her enhanced wits and very many skills to evade, seduce or even kill her way out of any sticky situation she finds herself in. For she is both superior and inferior to the average human. As an AP--artificial person--the best humanity has to offer has been written into Friday's DNA. Yet she is often treated like a second class citizen--if she were ever able to claim citizenship. Her mother was the test tube and her father the knife, as the saying goes, so she has less rights than the biologically-born human, and no soul, according to the church.