Crusoe expresses the idealism and impatience of many adolescents in rebelling against his father's pragmatic advice. His narrative of shipwreck and survival, which he stops and starts, retelling as story, as journal, even in tabular form, records the turbulence of his psychological state in acknowledging his fears and learning to make the most of his unlucky fate. The novel thus works on one level as a chronicle of grief and depression.

In keeping with eighteenth-century norms, Crusoe finds that the nearly incessant work required for mere survival also solaces him, as he labors to create his dream of a quotidian life. In the end, he constructs not just food and shelter, but also a home, a "country house," a "domain," a "kingdom" from the wilderness. An important strain of criticism on the novel discusses Crusoe as "economic man," since the novel's realist paean to the virtue of an ordinary life models the ideal development of English culture. Indeed, the detail of Defoe's narrative made it possible for readers more easily to imagine England as empire, and of English middle-class domesticity as a kind of culture that could be exported and replanted in colonies elsewhere.

The novel also references the popular eighteenth-century genre of spiritual autobiography in its attention to Crusoe's crises of faith. When he falls sick from bad turtle soup, he doctors himself with tobacco, reporting his symptoms, treatment, and side effects in almost case-historical style. But it is the Bible he finds next to the tobacco that cures his spiritual disorder. In the end, however, the minutiae of Crusoe's difficult daily life, and his satisfaction in building up a material replica of English homelife, dominates the novel more than the narrative's more conscious references to Crusoe's spiritual growth.