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“If I were stranded on a desert island, I would bring this book with me…” this hackneyed expression at the heart of the BBC show “Desert Island Discs” doesn’t mean that the speaker ever considers being stranded on an island. It refers to a common trope in Western culture which I call the fantasy of survival. Survival is often addressed as a way to explore one’s priorities and necessities and one’s know-how. The success of the guidebooks, movies, and reality-TV of the contemporary survivalist culture confirms this fascination for survival. In all cases, Robinson Crusoe is a major reference to exemplify all these aspects of the survival scenario: he re-discovers his favourite book, the Bible, he explores human skills and know-how by discovering all the crafts necessary to human life, such as cooking, sewing, pottery, weapon making. This article will investigate the notion of survival by examining the prevalence of this plot in many of Defoe’s works of fiction: Captain Singleton, Journal of the Plague Year, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, Roxana. I explore the historical and aesthetic reasons which make the possibilities of being stranded on an island, left alone in a pestilential city, or stuck in the desert with no freshwater provide pleasure to the early modern, and contemporary, readers.