When Treasure Island recounts a fight between Jim (armed with an unprimed pistol) and the mutinous Israel Hands (armed with a dagger), we see every single fine-grained moment of the encounter, through each reversal of fortune, until the sudden conclusion to the desperate fight. Contemporary readers of Stevenson often commented on his ability to render the visual aspect of things, his gift for combining visual and tactile sense impressions, as when he tells us that the villainous Black Dog’s pale face was colored like tallow, dirty yellowish-white candle wax seeming to melt into a disturbing absence of color itself. Later in his career the author said he was getting used to the “feel” and the “sounds” of scenes, more than anything visual. His imagination was turning inward.

With all this sensory precision, events in the story give the reader hints and clues that are never developed as explicitly named “deeper meanings.” If the aim is to transform the map into a narrative on more than one level, the method must be distinguished from that of other novels designed to show their characters expressing important ideological concepts, stories therefore belonging among novels of ideas. By contrast, with the adventure story there is one overwhelmingly important aspect to the animation of the magic map, and that is the hero’s adventuring forth on a quest of some intensely important kind, a quest defining the hero’s character almost as a thing in itself, separate from interests in the big world with all its complex social interests.

Sometimes, of course, the hero’s quest and that of society coincide, but here, in Stevenson, the coincidence is made to hit an absolute bottom line—the search for a charted treasure. This hunt is an almost involuntary action, as if everyone shares in it, one way or another. Curiously, the treasure in this novel is shown finally to have only the most limited inherent value. By the end of the story Jim Hawkins seems not to care about its variety, its amount, its price. His final estimate is almost excessively grown-up: “All of us had an ample share of the treasure and used it wisely or foolishly, according to our natures.” We see, then, the treasure is important only as it reveals “our natures.”

Perhaps, however, for Stevenson there is yet another definition of treasure, namely the imaginative dream of action that Jim’s story represents. For the author treasure signifies only if it implies the hunting and the experience the map has magically framed for him. In literary history, this was the period of the most famous anthology of poetry in English, Francis Turner Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics (1861), and also our most brilliant treasure chest of multiple meanings, Peter Roget’s original Thesaurus (1852). The issue is one of imaginative life. In parallel, the critic can point to literature as a partner in a spiritual enterprise. Written and spoken stories that require to be read, that require an adventure of literacy, by nature criticize the instant gratification of simplifying fundamentalist effects, largely because those forms of entertainment and all their noisy collaterals prefabricate the human response, whereas anything seen, felt, envisaged, described, narrated, or dramatized in imaginative language is bound to stimulate the mind. Such language refuses the seduction of the stock response. The most important form of novelty is what we have to imagine, because there is no phony simulacrum arranging for it to sell.

Finally, the ideal story for Stevenson is one that catches the atmosphere of the action and builds expectation upon that combination. His narrative skill is always mobilized to defeat the literalism of any unthinking, prosaic spectator whose torpid mind only a redeemed language could hope to revive.

The excitement of the lively reader reading is the true definition of treasure. A character in Shakespeare asks the question: “What’s aught, but as ’tis valued?” ( Troilus and Cressida, Act 2, scene 2). As for treasure in the literal sense of gold and silver, the ending of the novel provides an ironic moral to the tale. Jim is reminiscing at the very end, sadder and wiser. He takes a long look back at his adventure, his venture, his life as a privateer, and he gives the last word on the whole affair to a raucous Caribbean bird, Long John Silver’s parrot, Captain Flint. This long-lived creature is the last remaining link to the mysterious Flint. It is almost as if the parrot buried the loot himself, waiting to observe the mayhem its gold and silver would generate among the next batch of predators, gentlemen adventurers unrestrained by all their civilized habits and pretensions. Clearly there is no inherent conflict between adventure stories and deeper meanings, but the trick of conveying this requires considerable poetic skill, shown in a strangely melancholy ending of the tale that befits its secret interest in the growth of young Jim Hawkins’s character. In his final words the dream and the myth return, casting a long shadow over the adventure.

The bar silver and the arms still lie, for all that I know, where Flint buried them; and certainly they shall lie there for me. Oxen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts or start upright in bed with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

Angus Fletcher is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Recipient of a 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship, he is the author of books on allegory, prophecy, court masque, and the philosophy of literature, specializing in the theory of literature and in the symbolic connections between literature and the other arts. His interdisciplinary concerns are reflected in A New Theory for American Poetry: Environment, Democracy and the Future of the Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2004) and in his forthcoming Harvard University Press book Time, Space and Literature in the English Renaissance. In 1995 he was awarded a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support research into ecology and the literary imagination, particularly as these relate to the English poet John Clare. In 1992 he received the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for Colors of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature (Harvard University Press, 1991).