Treasure Island

Going in, I should have been pretty familiar with this story. I saw Muppet Treasure Island as a kid some fifteen years ago. My fifth grade class used Treasure Island for a play that I was part of. And at some point I had definitely even read a dumbed down kids' version of the story. But in spite of all of this - or perhaps because of all of this - when I picked up Treasure Island a week ago I had little to no recollection of most of the characters and actions I was reading about. So the story was kind of new to me all over again. And it's a good, timeless classic of a story. No complaints about Robert Louis Stevenson's writing this time around, either, unlike in my post about his famous Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde novella. This was just a simple but enjoyable and relatively short (200 pages) book. But Treasure Island is a classic for reasons that go beyond its own limited scope and greatness; it's one of those archetype-defining pieces of fiction that creates (or at least popularizes) so many tropes. "Fifteen men on a dead man's chest." Parrots as pirate pets. Treasure maps where X marks the spot. Marooning and mutiny. The list goes on and on, and so many of these pirate tropes that we take for granted today (and that Disney has built a recent successful movie trilogy on) were actually first put into literature, and hence popular culture, by Stevenson in this very book. It's that legacy that makes Treasure Island iconic; on its own merit, it's really no better than The Dark Frigate.