This book started on a very basic comparison between the island and the raft; a man and a young man; an Indian and a slave. The next question after those quick similarities was : did Twain revisit Defoe's novel ? The deeper the study goes, the more identical the two novels seem. Not only because they are called "adventures", but also the situations of the two characters at the beginning, the questions they come to answer, basic or metaphysical, at the same moments in the books... An analysis of the archetypes of the different mythologies and what they create in our minds, with the help of ethnologists, philosophers, sociologists, linguists and literature specialists, this book will try to cast a new light on the common idea of initiation in both novels and try to go deeper into the structures and discover, with the classification made by Simone Vierne, that the two books have shamanistic initiatory origins, structures and functions.