ABSTRACT Defoe’s fictional Englishmen turn to the notion of a life-debt as rhetorical resources for spinning fictions generative of reliable contractarian bond/bondage. This article explores what vexes Defoe as tough questions: how to set the conditions of a newfangled tie-up between complete strangers in the New World, or how to adjudicate broken political contracts between the Crown and the outlaws. In the era when the Civil War denaturalised the existing discourse on man’s duty to his monarch, Defoe strives to address early modern crisis of political obligation by reformulating a classical concept of a life-debt into a cement that would hold together precarious social relations into a sustainable form of paternalism. In the thick of their checkered criminal and colonial career, Defoe’s protagonists often slip into the Hobbesian states of nature that present itself in the form of major confrontations with the national sovereign and racial others. Thus, Defoe’s characters reconstruct them into sentimental hierarchies, suggesting a life-debt as a rationale for voluntary subjection. Furthermore, Defoe’s fictional narratives including Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, and Colonel Jack demonstrate how such contractarian discourse necessarily produces fiction-writing moments and rhetorical exemplars that complicate the morality of the author’s writings.

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生命债务作为丹尼尔笛福叙事小说中契约主义话语的修辞资源

摘要 笛福的虚构英国人将生命债务的概念作为修辞资源，用于生成可靠的契约契约/束缚的虚构小说。本文探讨了令笛福烦恼的棘手问题：如何为新世界中完全陌生的人之间的新奇关系设定条件，或者如何裁决王室与不法之徒之间破裂的政治契约。在内战使关于人对君主的义务的现有话语非自然化的时代，笛福力求通过将生命债务的经典概念重新表述为水泥，将不稳定的社会关系粘合成一种水泥，从而解决早期现代政治义务危机。可持续的家长制形式。在他们曲折的犯罪和殖民生涯中，笛福的主人公经常陷入霍布斯式的自然状态，这种状态以与国家主权和其他种族的重大对抗的形式出现。因此，笛福笔下的人物将它们重构为感伤的等级制度，暗示将生命债务作为自愿服从的理由。此外，笛福的虚构叙事，包括鲁滨逊漂流记、辛格尔顿船长和杰克上校，展示了这种契约主义话语如何必然产生使作者作品的道德复杂化的虚构写作时刻和修辞范例。