Scared by the crusty old seaman Pew, Jim relies on his mother for protection. In the first few chapters, Jim is an easily frightened boy who is closely associated with home and family. As the events unfold, JimвЂ™s character changes dramatically showing increasing cleverness, courage, maturity, and perspective. Yet often impulsive, he is responsible for initiating the majority of the plot twists throughout the story. Jim is portrayed as very humble, never boasting about his many exciting and impressive deeds. The son of an innkeeper, Jim begins the tale with the arrival of a salty old ex-pirate to his familyвЂ™s inn, the Admiral Benbow Inn. The main character of the story, a boy by the name of Jim Hawkins serves as the first-person narrator. Stevenson would later reveal that the first fifteen chapters of Treasure Island were written in as many days (Swinnerton 64).

This opening befits Stevenson who had a вЂњdevotion to the art of letters and to the less sophisticated, though not necessarily childish, life of adventureвЂќ (Kiely 20). Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17-, and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow Inn, and the brown old Seamen, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roofвЂќ (Stevenson 10). Written as a memoir, the work opens with the line вЂњSquire Trelawney, Dr. Stevenson found the inspiration to write Treasure Island after drawing a treasure map with his twelve-year-old son, Lloyd (Sandison). This rendered him a frightened, guilt-ridden child and also apparently something of a little prude, a characteristic he certainly outgrew by the time he reached his late teens (Harvey). During his frequent bouts with tuberculosis, his loving nurse, Alison Cunningham, liked to entertain him with stories of bloody deeds, hellfire, and damnation. Probably the two most important influences during StevensonвЂ™s childhood were his familyвЂ™s strict Presbyterian religion and his own poor health.

His mother, Margaret, was the daughter of a well-known clergyman (Livesey). His father, Thomas, was a civil engineer who specialized in the design and construction of lighthouses. Stevenson was born the only child of a prosperous middle-class family in Edinburgh, Scotland, in November 1850. This paper will present background information on both the novel and its author and analyze and discuss the major characters, themes and motifs. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, is a tale of adventure filled with exciting characters and set in exotic locales.

Treasure island characters