The Continuation is Grimmelshausen's 'pilgrim's progress', the concluding chapter in one of the greatest and most acclaimed German novels.
As in his other books, Grimmelshausen's fourth 'Simplician' novel combines fantastic episodes with a realistic narrative style.
At the end of his original adventures his hero withdraws from the world to live as a hermit in the Black Forest. Now, after a vivid dream of the Devil and all his minions at work, he decides to become a pilgrim and visit the holy places, making his way, with various encounters, across Switzerland to Italy, where he takes passage on a ship to Egypt. Outside Cairo he is captured by Arab robbers who take him to the Red Sea, exhibiting him as as wild man from the desert0.
Rescued by European merchants, he embarks on a ship to return home via the Cape of Good Hope, but the ship is wrecked and, 50 years before Robinson Crusoe, he is marooned on a desert island with the ship's carpenter. After his companion dies from over-indulgence in fermented palm juice, he is once again a hermit, happy with his lot, and rejects the offer of a return home when the crew of a Dutch ship, that was blown off course, land on his island.
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