The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger...

Faulkner
here is talking about the kind of descriptive detail that makes a former time and place seem
real to a reader. In , Defoe is famous for providing minute description
that makes Crusoe's adventure come alive. Although the book is a work of , Defoe writes it as if
it's the actual journal account of a shipwrecked sailor.

Unlike a romance or,
for instance, Shakespeare's play The Tempest, also about a shipwrecked
European managing to survive on a deserted island, no magical entities emerge to help Crusoe out
of his predicament. Part of the story's ongoing appeal is that Crusoe has to survive entirely by
his own wits, without any supernatural help (though he does gain a greater faith in God during
his time on the island). If he wants to eat, he has to hunt and grow crops.
If he wants to hunt, no magical bird is going to give him enchanted arrows:
he has to get back on his submerged ship and find gunpowder and bullets.

Getting back to Faulkner's quote, it is Defoe's , in showing every detail of
how Crusoe manages to survive, that holds a moment of time "fixed," so that you can
step through the pages and into that world.

Examples of the details of
Crusoe's methods of surviving and thriving abound in the novel. Here are several. In the first
two, Crusoe tells us in detail what he brings off the submerged ship. We can visualize this,
such as when he heads to the boat in low tide, and we understand how these items will help him
to survive. No detail is too small: he brings all the "small ropes" he can get; he
cuts the sails into pieces to use as canvas:

every day at
low water I went on board, and brought away something or other; but particularly the third time
I went I brought away as much of the rigging as I could, as also all the small ropes and
rope-twine I could get, with a piece of spare canvas, which was to mend the sails upon occasion,
and the barrel of wet gunpowder.In a word, I brought away all the sails, first and last; only
that I was fain to cut them in pieces, and bring as much at a time as I could, for they were no
more useful to be sails, but as mere canvas only.

In the
quote below, he brings us on the scene as if freezing time as he describes finding food on the
vessel. He even tells us how he wrapped up the bread:

every day at low water I went on board, and brought away something or other; but
particularly the third time I went I brought away as much of the rigging as I could, as also all
the small ropes and rope-twine I could get, with a piece of spare canvas, which was to mend the
sails upon occasion, and the barrel of wet gunpowder.In a word, I brought away all the sails,
first and last; only that I was fain to cut them in pieces, and bring as much at a time as I
could, for they were no more useful to be sails, but as mere canvas only.

Crusoe then tells us about the fruit he found on the island,
including on what day, and his practical concerns about the grapes, and how he dries them for
food:

The next day, the sixteenth, I went up the same way
again; and after going something further than I had gone the day before, I found the brook and
the savannahs cease, and the country become more woody than before.In this part I found
different fruits, and particularly I found melons upon the ground, in great abundance, and
grapes upon the trees.The vines had spread, indeed, over the trees, and the clusters of grapes
were just now in their prime, very ripe and rich.This was a surprising discovery, and I was
exceeding glad of them; but I was warned by my experience to eat sparingly of them; remembering
that when I was ashore in Barbary, the eating of grapes killed several of our Englishmen, who
were slaves there, by throwing them into fluxes and fevers.But I found an excellent use for
these grapes; and that was, to cure or dry them in the sun, and keep them as dried grapes or
raisins are kept, which I thought would be, as indeed they were, wholesome and agreeable to eat
when no grapes could be had.

These are simply a few
examples of how Defoe puts us right there with Crusoe, and is why this book is often called the
first novel. If you flip through the book, you will find so much more description of Crusoe's
new life.