Treasure Island

The island as testing ground for human nature — but Golding strips away the adventure framework to ask what happens without adults, without Silver's charismatic guidance, without rescue

The castaway tradition Treasure Island inherits — Ben Gunn IS Crusoe, and Stevenson's novel is partly a meditation on what Defoe's optimistic survival story leaves out

Stevenson's own follow-up adventure — a Scottish setting, a boy hero, and another charismatic anti-hero in Alan Breck who shares Silver's moral flexibility and charm

The sea as moral arena and the obsessive pursuit of a singular goal — Ahab's white whale and Gatsby's green light rhyme with each other, and both rhyme with the treasure

Buried treasure, betrayal, and the moral cost of getting what you want — Dantès and Gatsby find their treasure and it changes them in ways they didn't anticipate

Published one year after Treasure Island, sharing a boy narrator, a morally complex adult companion, and the question of what loyalty actually means when the law is wrong