Parrot Poll

Animal Mimesis in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

Abstract

The paper focuses on the famous scene in which Poll the parrot talks to Robinson Crusoe. It gives a close reading, revealing the ambivalence of violence and care in the relation between Robinson and Poll. It expands this ambivalence to a postcolonial approach, and it investigates — with and beyond Derrida — the poetological implications of the parrot's faculty of mimesis.