Gulliver's Travels

ABOUT THE AGE-

• The new Augustan Age becomes identified with the reign of Queen Anne (1702-14), though the spirit
of the age extends well beyond her death.
• In literature this period is known as the Augustan age. According to Hudson the epithet ―Augustan‖
was applied as a term of high praise, because the Age of Augustus was the golden age of Latin
literature, so the Age of Pope was the golden age of English literature
• This age may be divided into two periods: the first stretching from 1700 to 1750 in the neo-classic
Age, and the second, the transitional period which spans from 1750 to 1798. The classical tendencies
lost their hold during the second period and there was a transition from classicism to romanticism.
The period of transition is also known as the Age of Gray and Collins.
• Politically, this age witnessed the rise of two political parties: the Whigs and the Tories. Their political
opinions and programmes were sharply divided. The Whig party stood for the pre-eminence of
personal freedom and the Tory party supported the royal Divine Right.
• The supremacy of the middle class made it an age of tolerance, moderation and common sense. It
sought to refine manners, and introduce into life the rule of sweet reasonableness.
• The poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century as represented by the works of Pope and Dr.
Johnson is polished and witty but lacks fire, fine feeling, enthusiasm and imaginative appeal. In short,
it interests us as a study of life but fails to delight or inspire us. Matthew Arnold rightly calls if the
eighteenth century ―an age of prose‖.
• It was the age of enlightenment ,when there were a lot of inventions and a feudal system was broken
down. Poets showed their learning in the verses they wrote and knowledge was surfacing in the
eighteenth century.
• The 18th century in Europe was The Age of Enlightenment and literature explored themes of social
upheaval, reversals of personal status, political satire, geographical exploration and the comparison
between the supposed natural state of man and the supposed civilized state of man
• 18th century was marked by two main impulses: reason and passion. The respect paid to reason was
shown in pursuit of order, symmetry, decorum, and scientific knowledge; the cultivation of the
feelings stimulated philanthropy, exaltation of personal relationships, religious fervour, and the cult
of sentiment, or sensibility.
• The age of Swift is called “ The Age of Prose and Reason”. Swift came under the influence of his age—
an age when imagination and emotions were subordinated to reason and wit. People believed in the
supremacy of reason ; and their thoughts were determined by reason.
• Hence, Swift describes both imagination and emotions. He tries to convince his readers.
• He appeals to their minds not to their heats. Moreover, he offers a “ criticism of life” ; and criticism
has no link, Whatsoever, with imagination and emotions.
• There are no imaginative flights, nor soaring into the infinite, no raptures of idealism, no fine frenzies
of passion; there is just charity.
• The major prose writers of the age include Jonathan swift (1667 -1745) Joseph Addison (1672 -
1719), Richard Steele (1672 -1729) and Samuel Johnson (1704 – 1784). Other prose writers of
significance are James Bowell (1740 – 1795), Edlemund Burley (1729 – 1797) and Edward Gibbon
(1737 – 1794).
• Jonathan swift’s works are a monstrous satire on humanity.
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR-
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.

“Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.”

• Anglo-Irish poet, satirist, essayist, and political pamphleteer Jonathan Swift was born in 1667 in
Dublin, Ireland.
• he was dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.
• For the majority of his life, Swift was a victim of Meniere's disease, which affects balance and
hearing and causes nausea and dizziness.
• He is regarded by the Encyclopædia Britannica as the foremost prose satirist in the English
language,[1] and is less well known for his poetry.
• He originally published all of his works under pseudonyms – such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac
Bickerstaff, M. B. Drapier – or anonymously.
• He was a master of two styles of satire, the Horatian and Juvenalian styles.
• In 1713, Swift formed the literary club, Scriblerus along with Alexander Pope and others.
• Swift style is lucid and terse. He seems to have no difficulty in finding words to express exactly
the impression which he wishes to convey.
• Swift defined style as “ proper words in proper places.” This definition fits his own writing
perfectly well. Swift’s prose is an example of the right words in the right place. His words are
selected that they convey exactly the impression he wishes to create.
• His style was well suited to his thoughts, which are never decorated by sparkling conceits,
elevated by ambitious sentences or variegated by far-sought learning.”
• According to Matthew Arnold, the qualities of good prose are are ‘unfairly’, regularity, precision
and balance.” These are exactly the qualities of Swift’s prose. He always says clearly and
precisely what he means.
• Swift is remembered for works such as A Tale of a Tub (1704), An Argument Against Abolishing
Christianity (1712), Gulliver's Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729).

ABOUT THE WORK-

• Gulliver’s Travels, original title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, four-part satirical work
by Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift, published anonymously in 1726 as Travels into Several Remote
Nations of the World.
• It is a novel in four parts recounting Gulliver’s four voyages to fictional exotic lands. His travels is first
among diminutive people–the Lilliputians, then among enormous giants–people of Brobdingnag, then
among idealists and dreamers and finally among horses. Each book has a different theme, but their
common trait is to deflate human nature.
• A keystone of English literature, it was one of the books that gave birth to the novel form, though it did
not yet have the rules of the genre as an organizing tool.
• It is Swift's best known full-length work, and a classic of English literature. Swift claimed that he
wrote Gulliver's Travels "to vex the world rather than divert it".
• In 2015, Robert McCrum released his selection list of 100 best novels of all time in which Gulliver’s
Travels is listed as "a satirical masterpiece
 Quotes-
• In this terrible Agitation of Mind I could not forbear thinking of Lilliput, whose Inhabitants looked
upon me as the greatest Prodigy that ever appeared in the World: where I was able to draw an
Imperial Fleet in my Hand
• They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with
death.
• This made me reflect upon the fair skins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only
because they are of our own size and their defects not to be seen through a magnifying glass,
where we find by experiment that the smoothest and whitest skins look rough and coarse, and ill
colored.
• The learning of this people is very defective, consisting only in morality, history, poetry, and
mathematics, wherein they must be allowed to excel. But the last of these is wholly applied to what
may be useful in life, to the improvement of agriculture and all mechanical arts; so that among us it
would be little esteemed

INTERTEXTUAL REFERENCE-
• despite the courage Gulliver shows throughout his voyages, his character lacks basic greatness.
This impression could be due to the fact that he rarely shows his feelings, reveals his soul, or
experiences great passions of any sort. But other literary adventurers, like Odysseus in
Homer’s Odyssey, seem heroic without being particularly open about their emotions.

CRITICAL COMMENTS-
• Gulliver’s Travels is an anatomy of human nature, a sardonic looking-glass, often criticised for its
apparent misanthropy. It asks its readers to refute it, to deny that it has adequately characterised
human nature and society. Each of the four books—recounting four voyages to mostly fictional
exotic lands—has a different theme, but all are attempts to deflate human pride. Critics hail the
work as a satiric reflection on the shortcomings of Enlightenment thought.
• The novel represents the culmination of Swift’s years spent in politics with Whigs and Tories and
also deals with socio-political issues hidden between the lines.
• Many critics like William Deans Howells; T.S. Eliot etc. have called Jonathan Swift the greatest
writer of prose like T.S. Eliot says that "Swift, the greatest writer of English prose, and the
greatest man who has ever written great English prose."
• John Gay remarked "It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery."[3]

CHARACTERS-

Lemuel Gulliver
• Gulliver is a trained surgeon and sea captain who travels throughout the world on several
voyages, learning about different cultures and customs. He is married to Mary Burton with two
children (who consequently grow up without him), and spends some sixteen years and
seventeen months in his adventures, and ultimately returns home a changed man.
• He is resourceful, open-minded, adamant about his own truthfulness, and a remarkably fast
learner of new languages.
• Though Gulliver is glad to return to England after his first three adventures in Lilliput,
Brobdingnag and Laputia, his time among the Houyhnhmns permanently darkens Gulliver’s
perspective on humankind and he ends the novel disgusted by the society around him and
longing for the company of Houyhnhmns.
• He is not cowardly—on the contrary, he undergoes the unnerving experiences of nearly being
devoured by a giant rat, taken captive by pirates, shipwrecked on faraway shores, sexually
assaulted by an eleven-year-old girl, and shot in the face with poison arrows.
• One modern critic has described Gulliver as possessing the smallest will in all of Western
literature: he is simply devoid of a sense of mission, a goal that would make his wandering into a
quest.
• Gulliver seems too dull for any battles of wit and too unimaginative to think up tricks, and thus he
ends up being passive in most of the situations in which he finds himself. He is held captive
several times throughout his voyages, but he is never once released through his own
stratagems, relying instead on chance factors for his liberation.
• Once presented with a way out, he works hard to escape, as when he repairs the boat he finds
that delivers him from Blefuscu, but he is never actively ingenious in attaining freedom. This
example summarizes quite well Gulliver’s intelligence, which is factual and practical rather than
imaginative or introspective.
• Gulliver is gullible, as his name suggests. For example, he misses the obvious ways in which the
Lilliputians exploit him. While he is quite adept at navigational calculations and the humdrum
details of seafaring, he is far less able to reflect on himself or his nation in any profoundly critical
way.
• He is a self-hating, self-proclaimed Yahoo at the end, announcing his misanthropy quite loudly,
but even this attitude is difficult to accept as the moral of the story.
• Gulliver is not a figure with whom we identify but, rather, part of the array of personalities and
behaviors about which we must make judgments.
• He is of good and solid — but unimaginative — English stock
• He is, in short, Mr. British middle class of his time.
• Gulliver is also, as might be expected, "gullible." He believes what he is told. He is an honest
man, and he expects others to be honest.
• In Brobdingnag (Book II), Gulliver is still an ordinary moral man, but the Brobdingnagians are
moral giant men. Certainly they are not perfect, but their moral superiority is as great to Gulliver
as is their physical size
• we see Gulliver as the hypocrite — he lies to the Brobdingnagian king in order to conceal what is
despicable about his native England. Gulliver's moral height can never reach that of the
Brobdingnagians.
• Swift reinforces the idea of the giant's moral superiority by having Gulliver identify the English
with the Lilliputians. This association also makes Gulliver ridiculous. It demonstrates the folly and
self-deception that Gulliver practices in identifying himself with the moral giants.
• Gulliver is virtually a madman. His attitudes when he arrives in London make him a source of
derision, for Gulliver seeks to change his basic nature by thinking; reason becomes the sole
guide of his life
• Swift often makes Gulliver give a superficial view of things, like the political games in the
Lilliputian court.
• He often uses Gulliver to criticize or to make a moral judgement, while claiming that he writes
without passion or prejudice.
• The fact is that Gulliver is a good observer incapable of seeing what matters most, and is
literalminded, totally unimaginative and humourless. This is why Gulliver at once sees everything
and sees nothing. He sees only two extremes, and so is prone to easy judgements and false
moral conclusions.
The Laputian King

• Lacking all common sense and utterly pre-occupied by abstractions, the Laputian King rules the
land of Lagado from a floating island that never touches ground
• The emperor of Lilliput treats Gulliver well as long as he believes Gulliver is showing him respect
and obedience.
• In fact, the emperor expects obedience from everyone in his court.
• Disobedience is met with a death sentence, as evidenced by the treason charges leveled at
Gulliver—the result of Gulliver's politeness toward visitors from a neighboring kingdom during
peace talks—and the danger Gulliver's friend faces in warning him about said charges.
• The Lilliputian emperor, out of mercy, plans to blind and starve Gulliver — a direct reference to
George's treatment of captured Jacobites, whom he executed — after parliament had called him
most merciful and lenient.
• His power and majesty impress Gulliver deeply, but to us he appears both laughable and
sinister. Because of his tiny size, his belief that he can control Gulliver seems silly, but his
willingness to execute his subjects for minor reasons of politics or honor gives him a frightening
aspect.
• He is proud of possessing the tallest trees and biggest palace in the kingdom, but he is also quite
hospitable, spending a fortune on his captive’s food.
• The emperor is both a satire of the autocratic ruler and a strangely serious portrait of political
power.
• Lilliputian Emperor represents the King of England at the time of the publication of Gulliver's
Travels, George I. George was a strongly pro-Whig king. The King actively persecuted the
Tories, hence the whole high heel/low heel thing (discussed in the Lilliputians' "Character
Analysis"). The Emperor's vulnerability to manipulation by his ministers, Flimnap and Skyresh
Bolgolam, implies that the actual King, George I, is too easily influenced by his favorites.
• The Emperor of Lilliput also loves war, and really wants to enslave the people of his neighboring
island, Blefuscu. When Gulliver refuses to help him destroy Blefuscu's freedom, the Emperor
starts to hate Gulliver.

Lilliputians
• The inhabitants of Lilliput. They are about five to six inches tall. They are the sworn enemies of
the Blefuscudians of a neighboring Island.
• They are mean and nasty, vicious, morally corrupt, hypocritical and deceitful, jealous and envious,
filled with greed and ingratitude — they are, in fact, completely human.
• Typically greedy, jealous, manipulative, conniving, violent, selfish, and untrustworthy; they are, in
all ways, an accurate portrayal of their "giant" counterparts. They live on the island of Lilliput,
located on the Indian Ocean.
• Swift uses the Lilliputians to satirize specific events and people in his life. For example, Swift's
model for Flimnap was Robert Walpole, the leader of the Whigs and England's first prime minister
in the modern sense. Walpole was an extremely wily politician, as Swift shows, by making
Flimnap the most dexterous of the rope dancers. Reldresal, the second most dexterous of the
rope dancers, probably represents either Viscount Townshend or Lord Carteret. Both were
political allies of Walpole.
• The articles that Gulliver signs to obtain his freedom relate the political life of Lilliput to the political
life of England. The articles themselves parallel particular English codes and laws. Similarly, the
absurd and complicated method by which Gulliver must swear to the articles (he must hold his
right foot in his left hand and place the middle finger of his right hand on top of his head with the
right thumb on the tip of his ear) exemplifies an aspect of Whig politics: petty, red-tape harassing.
• Swift also uses the Lilliputians to show that English politicians were bloody-minded and
treacherous. In detail, he records the bloody and cruel methods that the Lilliputians plan to use to
kill Gulliver; then he comments ironically on the mercy, decency, generosity, and justice of kings.
• For all crimes against the state they are punished here extremely strictly, but if the defendant's
innocence is proved on the court, then the bailiff is given a shameful execution, and from his
property, a penalty is levied in favor of the innocent, and the innocence is announced throughout
the city.
• They consider fraud to be a more serious crime than theft and therefore punish him for death
because care and vigilance can save the property from a thief, but honesty can do nothing against
a nimble fraud. Appointing someone to a state post, they pay more attention to moral qualities
than to abilities.
• They believe that truth, justice, moderation and other similar qualities are available to everyone
and that these things, with experience and good intentions, make everyone able to serve their
country. Ingratitude is considered a criminal offense in the Lilliputian’s state.

The Houyhnhnms

• Rational, peaceful, generous, and civilized horses, the Houyhnhnms are ideal beings (at least
from Gulliver’s perspective).
• They are so honest and virtuous that they don’t even have words for things like “evil” and
“falsehood.”
• They live content in their egalitarian and placid society troubled only by the question of how to
constrain the Yahoos that live among them.

The Farmer –
Gulliver’s first master in Brobdingnag. The farmer speaks to Gulliver, showing that he is willing to
believe that the relatively tiny Gulliver may be as rational as he himself is, and treats him with
gentleness. However, the farmer puts Gulliver on display around Brobdingnag, which clearly shows
that he would rather profit from his discovery than converse with him as an equal. His exploitation of
Gulliver as a laborer, which nearly starves Gulliver to death, seems less cruel than simpleminded.
Generally, the farmer represents the average Brobdingnagian of no great gifts or intelligence,
wielding an extraordinary power over Gulliver simply by virtue of his immense size.

Glumdalclitch –
The farmer’s nine-year-old daughter, who is forty feet tall. Glumdalclitch becomes Gulliver’s friend
and nursemaid, hanging him to sleep safely in her closet at night and teaching him the
Brobdingnagian language by day. She is skilled at sewing and makes Gulliver several sets of new
clothes, taking delight in dressing him. When the queen discovers that no one at court is suited to
care for Gulliver, she invites Glumdalclitch to live at court as his sole babysitter, a function she
performs with great seriousness and attentiveness. To Glumdalclitch, Gulliver is basically a living
doll, symbolizing the general status Gulliver has in Brobdingnag.

The Queen –
The queen of Brobdingnag, who is so delighted by Gulliver’s beauty and charms that she agrees to
buy him from the farmer for 1,000 pieces of gold. Gulliver appreciates her kindness after the
hardships he suffers at the farmer’s and shows his usual fawning love for royalty by kissing the tip of
her little finger when presented before her. She possesses, in Gulliver’s words, “infinite” wit and
humor, though this description may entail a bit of Gulliver’s characteristic flattery of superiors. The
queen seems genuinely considerate, asking Gulliver whether he would consent to live at court
instead of simply taking him in as a pet and inquiring into the reasons for his cold good-byes with the
farmer. She is by no means a hero, but simply a pleasant, powerful person.

The King –
The king of Brobdingnag, who, in contrast to the emperor of Lilliput, seems to be a true intellectual,
well versed in political science among other disciplines. While his wife has an intimate, friendly
relationship with the diminutive visitor, the king’s relation to Gulliver is limited to serious discussions
about the history and institutions of Gulliver’s native land. He is thus a figure of rational thought who
somewhat prefigures the Houyhnhnms in Book IV.

Lord Munodi –
A lord of Lagado, capital of the underdeveloped land beneath Laputa, who hosts Gulliver and gives
him a tour of the country on Gulliver’s third voyage. Munodi is a rare example of practical-minded
intelligence both in Lagado, where the applied sciences are wildly impractical, and in Laputa, where
no one even considers practicality a virtue. He fell from grace with the ruling elite by counseling a
commonsense approach to agriculture and land management in Lagado, an approach that was
rejected even though it proved successful when applied to his own flourishing estate. Lord Munodi
serves as a reality check for Gulliver on his third voyage, an objective-minded contrast to the
theoretical delusions of the other inhabitants of Laputa and Lagado.

THEME-

The Body
Throughout Gulliver's Travels the narrator spends a great deal of time discussing the human body-
going so far as to detail his own urination and defecation. In each of the various lands to
which Gulliver travels, he comes face to face with excrement. In Lilliput he urinates on the queen's
apartment to put out a fire; in Luggnagg the professors work to turn excrement back into the food it
began as; in the country of the Houyhnhnms the Yahoos throw their excrement at each other and at
him.
Swift's emphasis on bodily functions and excrement provides a satirical counterweight to the
tendency of his age, which championed man as a rational creature and became known as the
Enlightenment. Swift was eager to remind humanity that underneath their pretensions to rationality
and superiority, they were made of the same skin, blood, and bone as the animals, and shared their
basic needs, appetites, and functions.

Might Versus Right

Gulliver’s Travels implicitly poses the question of whether physical power or moral righteousness
should be the governing factor in social life. Gulliver experiences the advantages of physical might
both as one who has it, as a giant in Lilliput where he can defeat the Blefuscudian navy by virtue of
his immense size, and as one who does not have it, as a miniature visitor to Brobdingnag where he
is harassed by the hugeness of everything from insects to household pets.

But alongside the use of physical force, there are also many claims to power based on moral
correctness. The whole point of the egg controversy that has set Lilliput against Blefuscu is not
merely a cultural difference but, instead, a religious and moral issue related to the proper
interpretation of a passage in their holy book. This difference of opinion seems to justify, in their eyes
at least, the warfare it has sparked. Similarly, the use of physical force against the Yahoos is justified
for the Houyhnhnms by their sense of moral superiority: they are cleaner, better behaved, and more
rational. But overall, the novel tends to show that claims to rule on the basis of moral righteousness
are often just as arbitrary as, and sometimes simply disguises for, simple physical subjugation.
As the novel considers the dangers of physical power in society, it also considers the physical
character of the individual and reflects on how best to handle one’s body. The Laputians’
and Lagadans’ obsession with reason and knowledge has rendered them utterly out of touch with
their bodies. Their inability to function in the practical, physical world has in turn destroyed their
society, and their example indicates that ignoring physical reality inevitably leads to suffering.
Among the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver learns that the possession of a human body does
not automatically elevate a person over the animals. The Yahoos, it turns out, are much more bestial
than the animal Houyhnhnms. This directly contradicts the common European assertion of the time
that human bodies were automatically superior to animal bodies because the human form
necessarily contained moral and rational power. Indeed, the Houyhnhnms possess a stronger moral
compass and sense of reason than the Yahoos and the Europeans alike.

The abuse of power

Who holds power, why they hold it, and how they use or abuse it, are recurring themes throughout
Gulliver's Travels. The Lilluptians, despite their small size, wield considerable power over Gulliver,
taking advantage of his well-meaning, non-aggressive, and gullible nature to attack him with arrows,
hold him prisoner, and finally try to entrap him through treachery. Lilliput is governed by a vain and
despotic ruler who has his subjects tortured and executed for trivial matters. His ministers are
appointed to office not based on their suitability, wisdom, or virtue, but on their skill at "leaping and
creeping." The correspondences between Lilliputian people and events and English political life
means that Swift intended his portrayal of Lilliput to reflect abuses of power in the English monarchy
and government.

When he is offered the secret of gunpowder, he refuses on humanitarian grounds, even though this
would vastly increase his nation's power.

Swift implicitly questions the reasons why certain people hold power over others. The Laputan king
assumes that he has a right to hold power over the Balnibarbians on the mainland simply because he
is more devoted to abstract and theoretical knowledge than they are. To the reader, on the other
hand, he appears ridiculously impractical and not fit to hold power. Similarly, the Laputans view Lord
Munodi as hopelessly backward because he does not embrace the reforms of the professors of
Lagado Academy; it seems likely that his estate and house will be seized by the government.

The Individual versus Society

Most of the time during his travels, Gulliver feels isolated from the societies he visits. He does not fit
in anywhere, and even during his brief returns to England, he expresses no wish to stay and leaves
as quickly as he can. This has led to some critics calling Gulliver's Travels the first novel of modern
alienation.

The country of the Houyhnhnms is unique among the nations Gullliver visits because of its
subjugation of the individual to the good of society as a whole, which leads to an orderly and well-run
nation. The price is that there is little room for human-style individuality. Nobody can become
attached to their children because they may be assigned to another family that has a shortage of
children; mates are chosen not by individual preference, but for the good of the race; servanthood is
genetically mandated. Only during his stay with the Houyhnhnms does Gulliver wish to assimilate
into society. His attempts are ridiculous, leading to his taking on the gait and speech patterns of his
horse hosts. More seriously, they are doomed to fail: the Houyhnhnms decide that he is not one of
them and expel him. The only society to which Gulliver wishes to belong will not have him. Swift
raises questions about the conflict between the individual and society, but does not resolve them.
 Gulliver’s Travels could in fact be described as one of the first novels of modern alienation, focusing
on an individual’s repeated failures to integrate into societies to which he does not belong. England
itself is not much of a homeland for Gulliver, and, with his surgeon’s business unprofitable and his
father’s estate insufficient to support him, he may be right to feel alienated from it. He never speaks
fondly or nostalgically about England, and every time he returns home, he is quick to leave again.
Gulliver never complains explicitly about feeling lonely, but the embittered and antisocial
misanthrope we see at the end of the novel is clearly a profoundly isolated individual. Thus, if Swift’s
satire mocks the excesses of communal life, it may also mock the excesses of individualism in its
portrait of a miserable and lonely Gulliver talking to his horses at home in England.

Literature and Language

He reads whenever he has the time. And on each of the islands he visits, he makes a point of
noticing whether the inhabitants write or do not write. The Lilliputians, for instance, write diagonally
like the ladies of England. The Houyhnhnms lack a form of writing, but Gulliver spends a great deal
of time considering how they pass on their history.

Gulliver is also a master linguist, making him a man of virtually all peoples. On each of the islands he
visits, he learns the language quickly, sometimes being taught by learned scholars (as in Lilliput) and
once being taught by a young girl (in Brobdingnag). His ability to communicate suggests the value of
communication across cultures. Once Gulliver has learned the language of a given society, he visits
the King or Queen or Emperor or Governor and discusses politics. This ability to share knowledge is
beneficial to both parties.

The absurdity of pride

Many examples of misplaced pride occur in the novel. The Lilliputians are proud of their military
capability, although if Gulliver-sized human beings launched an invasion they would be instantly
crushed. Swift draws attention to the absurdity of their pride by having them arrange a military parade
in view of Gulliver's exposed nether regions.

Although Gulliver attacks pride in his final chapter, he fails to notice that he himself has fallen victim to
it in his rejection of humanity on the grounds that they are Yahoos. His pride blinds him to genuine
virtue, such as that of Don Pedro, and makes him cruelly reject his wife and family.

Perspective and Relativity

In Gulliver's Travels the reader comes to realize that much in the world really is relative. Gulliver's
first journey lands him in Lilliput where he is called the Mountain Man, because the people there are
only five to six inches tall. On the other hand, in Brobdingnag, Gulliver is tiny compared to the
enormous creatures who find him and keep him as a pet.
Above all, Gulliver’s Travels is a novel about perspective. While the story is abundant with potential
morals, the strongest and most consistent message is a lesson in relativism: one’s point of view is
contingent upon one’s own physical and social circumstances and looking at people’s circumstances
explains a lot about their respective viewpoints. Gulliver explicitly lectures the reader on relativism,
explaining how England’s ideas of beauty, goodness, and fairness are radically different from notions
of those qualities possessed by the beings he visits in other lands. Until novel’s end, Gulliver is able
to see merit in his own country’s perspective as well as in the perspectives of other nations, a fair-
mindedness which he acquires from immersing himself in different cultures and adopting their
opposite points of view.
The novel ultimately suggests that one’s perspective on reality is even more powerful than reality
itself. When Gulliver returns to England from Brobdingnag, he encounters “normal” human-sized life
but sees everyone and everything as miniature. He thus misgauges size, misjudges people’s health,
and generally misunderstands his situation until enough time passes for his perspective to adjust.
Likewise, Gulliver’s time spent among the Houyhnhmns enables him to see his own society in a new
way. Though he has been eager to go home after all his prior adventures, he no longer wants to
return to England after living amongst the Houyhnhmns, for he has so internalized their perspective
that he sees all human beings as Yahoos. He is disgusted even by his own reflection and starts
affecting the manner of a horse. Though he is, from a biological standpoint, still fully human, his new
perspective has transformed him into a Houyhnhmn and he can no longer function in human society.

Perspective and relativity do not only apply to size, however, in Gulliver's Travels. After spending
time with the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver considers them above humanity in nearly every way. Returning
to England, Gulliver is repulsed by the humans he formerly loved and instead chooses to spend his
time in the barn with his horses

Society and the State

As Gulliver travels from society to society, he observes each one’s organization in detail and
compares and contrasts it with the English state. Though all of the societies visited are flawed,
several possess some admirable qualities and almost all of them play out the consequences of a
particular utopian ideal. Their admirable qualities include the peaceful Brobdingnagian king’s disgust
at the thought of gunpowder and rule by violent force; the Lilliputian king’s initial generosity and
warmth towards the foreign Gulliver; the Houyhnhnms’ reason-driven peace and order. But the
societies also demonstrate the unfortunate outcome of certain utopian ideals. Lilliput separates its
children from their birth parents (as Plato himself advised in), but the practice does not end up
yielding very mature or reasonable adults. The Lilliputian king and his court are petty grudge-holders,
no better than the monarchs of Europe.

Swift never draws up a formula for an ideal state and society because he does not believe that one
exists. However, by showing the goods and ills of the vastly different societies Gulliver visits, Swift
implicitly points out the errors of human society while also cautioning against the embrace of certain
“utopian” solutions.

Knowledge versus wisdom

The novel surveys many different kinds of knowledge and examines the effect they have on the
people possessing them. Gulliver’s worldly knowledge about other societies and lifestyles makes him
tolerant and open-minded person, able to see both sides of most stories while many of the minds
around him are more rigid. Still, it’s unclear if this knowledge actually serves Gulliver well—it ends up,
after all, leaving him dissatisfied and lonely, estranged from his family and his society and wishing
futilely that he was one of the Houyhnhmms.

In Brobdingnag and the land of the Houyhnhnms, the novel considers the kind of political knowledge
that both the Brobdingnagian king and the Houyhnhnms lack. Yet, while both are ignorant of
gunpowder, Machiavellian strategies, and the use of fear and violence to keep people in line, both
organize successful, happy societies that seem much more functional than those governed by the
more “sophisticated” political knowledge of Europe. The novel also compares practical scientific
knowledge, as practiced to valuable effect by the Lilliputians and the Houyhnhnms, to abstract
scientific knowledge, as practiced to useless effect by the the Laputians.

Swift emphasizes in Gulliver's Travels that knowledge is not equivalent to wisdom. Certain Lilliputian
politicians are knowledgable about the leaping and creeping necessary to gain power, but the people
live in fear of their rulers' edicts condemning the innocent to death. Laputans study abstract
mathematics and music, and research high-flown theories in their academy, while the ordinary people
starve

The Limits of Human Understanding

The idea that humans are not meant to know everything and that all understanding has a natural limit
is important in Gulliver’s Travels. Swift singles out theoretical knowledge in particular for attack: his
portrait of the disagreeable and self-centered Laputans, who show blatant contempt for those who are
not sunk in private theorizing, is a clear satire against those who pride themselves on knowledge
above all else. Practical knowledge is also satirized when it does not produce results, as in the
academy of Balnibarbi, where the experiments for extracting sunbeams from cucumbers amount to
nothing.

Truth and Deception

Truth and deception are prominent themes in Gulliver's Travels. For one thing, the reader is
constantly questioning whether or not Gulliver is a reliable narrator-simply because what he is
conveying is so fantastic. Most critics and readers determine that Gulliver is reliable, however. One
sign of his honesty is established within the first few pages, when he tells the reader about where he
came from.

Our comfort with Gulliver's reliability is challenged in the last chapter of the novel, though, when
Gulliver tells his readers he cannot tell a lie and swears this oath

Much of the novel’s plot action is driven by deceptions, and Gulliver takes note of the inhabitants’
feelings about truth and lying in every country he visits. Deceptions that drive plot action include the
Lilliputians’ secret plot to starve Gulliver to death and Gulliver’s subsequent deceits to escape Lilliput.
Then, in Brobdingnag, Gulliver deliberately conceals as many of his mishaps he can
from Glumdalclitch in order to try to maintain his dignity and freedom. Later, Gulliver lies to the
Japanese emperor about being Dutch in order to be granted passage to England. Finally, in the land
of the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver deliberately avoids correcting the Houyhnhnms misimpression that
his clothes are a part of his body, which helps distinguish him enough from the Yahoos to convince
the Houyhnhnms he isn’t really one of them. .

As certain as the novel’s human readers are that the societies described are pure fantasy, so too do
the characters that inhabit those societies refuse to believe Gulliver’s descriptions of human society
and insist that Europe is make-believe. Further, Swift makes a concerted effort at verisimilitude by
including the preface from Richard Sympson, which repeatedly alludes to geographical facts omitted,
supposedly to prevent boredom.

Travel
The novel is set in the traditional mode of satirical travel literature. Many other classic works use the
same device, such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Homer's Odyssey. Travel in the case of
Gulliver's Travels gives Swift the opportunity to compare the ways of humanity, more specifically
those of the English, with several other ways of living. Travel also keeps the story entertaining. It is
not often that a person finds a book with four sailing journeys each interrupted by torrential storms,
although one should remember that the Age of Exploration in Europe provided many stories of travels
and discoveries of new lands and new peoples.
 Symbols
Lilliputians
The Lilliputians symbolize humankind’s wildly excessive pride in its own puny existence. Swift fully
intends the irony of representing the tiniest race visited by Gulliver as by far the most vainglorious and
smug, both collectively and individually. There is surely no character more odious in all of Gulliver’s
travels than the noxious Skyresh. There is more backbiting and conspiracy in Lilliput than anywhere
else, and more of the pettiness of small minds who imagine themselves to be grand. When the
Lilliputian emperor requests that Gulliver serve as a kind of makeshift Arch of Triumph for the troops
to pass under, it is a pathetic reminder that their grand parade—in full view of Gulliver’s nether
regions—is supremely silly, a basically absurd way to boost the collective ego of the nation. Indeed,
the war with Blefuscu is itself an absurdity springing from wounded vanity, since the cause is not a
material concern like disputed territory but, rather, the proper interpretation of scripture by the
emperor’s forebears and the hurt feelings resulting from the disagreement. All in all, the Lilliputians
symbolize misplaced human pride, and point out Gulliver’s inability to diagnose it correctly.

Brobdingnagians
The Brobdingnagians symbolize the private, personal, and physical side of humans when examined
up close and in great detail. The philosophical era of the Enlightenment tended to overlook the
routines of everyday life and the sordid or tedious little facts of existence, but in Brobdingnag such
facts become very important for Gulliver, sometimes matters of life and death. .

The Brobdingnagians do not symbolize a solely negative human characteristic, as the Laputans do.
They are not merely ridiculous—some aspects of them are disgusting, like their gigantic stench and
the excrement left by their insects, but others are noble, like the queen’s goodwill toward Gulliver and
the king’s commonsense views of politics. More than anything else, the Brobdingnagians symbolize a
dimension of human existence visible at close range, under close scrutiny.

Laputans
The Laputans represent the folly of theoretical knowledge that has no relation to human life and no
use in the actual world. Laputa symbolizes the absurdity of knowledge that has never been tested or
applied, the ludicrous side of Enlightenment intellectualism. Even down below in Balnibarbi, where
the local academy is more inclined to practical application, knowledge is not made socially useful as
Swift demands. Indeed, theoretical knowledge there has proven positively disastrous, resulting in the
ruin of agriculture and architecture and the impoverishment of the population. Even up above, the
pursuit of theoretical understanding has not improved the lot of the Laputans. They have few material
worries, dependent as they are upon the Balnibarbians below. But they are tormented by worries
about the trajectories of comets and other astronomical speculations: their theories have not made
them wise, but neurotic and disagreeable. The Laputans do not symbolize reason itself but rather the
pursuit of a form of knowledge that is not directly related to the improvement of human life.

Houyhnhnms
The Houyhnhnms represent an ideal of rational existence, a life governed by sense and moderation
of which philosophers since Plato have long dreamed. Indeed, there are echoes of
Plato’s Republic in the Houyhnhnms’ rejection of light entertainment and vain displays of luxury, their
appeal to reason rather than any holy writings as the criterion for proper action, and their communal
approach to family planning. As in Plato’s ideal community, the Houyhnhnms have no need to lie nor
any word for lying. They do not use force but only strong exhortation. Their subjugation of the Yahoos
appears more necessary than cruel and perhaps the best way to deal with an unfortunate blot on their
otherwise ideal society. In these ways and others, the Houyhnhnms seem like model citizens, and
Gulliver’s intense grief when he is forced to leave them suggests that they have made an impact on
him greater than that of any other society he has visited.

They have no names in the narrative nor any need for names, since they are virtually
interchangeable, with little individual identity. Their lives seem harmonious and happy, although quite
lacking in vigor, challenge, and excitement. Indeed, this apparent ease may be why Swift chooses to
make them horses rather than human types like every other group in the novel. He may be hinting, to
those more insightful than Gulliver, that the Houyhnhnms should not be considered human ideals at
all. In any case, they symbolize a standard of rational existence to be either espoused or rejected by
both Gulliver and us.

Clothing
Clothing in Gulliver’s Travels symbolizes perspective and thus each population that Gulliver visits
sports different garments. The tiny clothes of the Lilliputians differ from the immense clothing of
the Brobdingnaggians as their small size endows them with a different view of the world from that of
the giant Brobdingnaggians; the Laputians’ elaborate robes decorated with astronomical and
mathematical symbols are the opposite of the Houyhnhmns’ nakedness, as their preoccupations with
theory and abstraction are utterly distinct from the Houyhnhmns down-to-earth wisdom. Though
Gulliver comes to each country wearing his own clothes, those clothes gradually fall apart and he is
outfitted in native garments. Likewise, Gulliver enters each country carrying his own ideas and
opinions but, as he immerses himself in the new society, his mindset is shaped by the people around
him until his perspective starts to match theirs.

Excrement
In Gulliver’s Travels, excrement symbolizes the crude reality of human flesh, a fact Gulliver faces
most prominently in the filthy, feces-flinging bodies of the Yahoos. Yet excrement occurs in every
other one of his other adventures too: in Lilliput, Gulliver defecates on the floor of his Lilliputian home
and urinates on the Lilliputians’ burning palace; in Brobdingnag, flies defecate on Gulliver’s food and
maids urinate in front of him; in Laputia, the projectors attempt to transform human feces back into
food. The recurring appearance of excrement anchors the novel in the body’s demands, limits, and
inelegances, refusing to let its characters float off into the heady realm of purely elegant abstractions.

England
As the site of his father’s disappointingly “small estate” and Gulliver’s failing business, England seems
to symbolize deficiency or insufficiency, at least in the financial sense that matters most to Gulliver.
England is passed over very quickly in the first paragraph of Chapter I, as if to show that it is simply
there as the starting point to be left quickly behind. Gulliver seems to have very few nationalistic or
patriotic feelings about England, and he rarely mentions his homeland on his travels. England is
brought more explicitly into the fabric of Gulliver’s Travels when Gulliver, in his neurotic state, starts
confusing Houyhnhnmland with his homeland, referring to Englishmen as Yahoos. The distinction
between native and foreign thus unravels—the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos are not just races
populating a faraway land but rather types that Gulliver projects upon those around him. The
possibility thus arises that all the races Gulliver encounters could be versions of the English and that
his travels merely allow him to see various aspects of human nature more clearly.

Satires in Gulliver’s Travels

Gulliver’s Travels reflects conflicts in British society in the early 18th century. By narrating Gulliver’s
adventures in Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and Houyhnhnm, the novel reveals and criticizes sins and
corruption of British ruling class and their cruel exploitation towards people of Britain and neighboring
countries in the capital-accumulation period of British history. Gulliver is treated differently in different
countries. The author depicts every situation at great length, which makes readers feel like experiencing
them personally. The greatness of the work lies in the author’s proficient application of bitting and
profound satires. Swift makes satirical effects to the fullest by using techniques of irony, contrast, and
symbolism. The story is based on then British social reality. He not only satirizes on then British politics
and religion, but also, in a deeper facet, on human nature itself. Swift’s superb rendering of satires leads
Gulliver’s Travels to becoming a milestone looked up to by future literary persons in satirical literature.

There are at least three types of satirical technique presented in Gulliver’s Travels: verbal irony,
situational irony and dramatic irony. First, verbal irony means using words in an opposite way. The real
implied meaning is in opposition to the literal meaning of the lines in verbal irony. In other words, it uses
positive, laudatory words to describe evidently ugly and obnoxious matters in order to express the
author’s contempt and aversion. The book carries verbal irony from the beginning to the end of the story.
Second, situational irony occurs when there are conflicts between characters and situation, or
contradiction between readers’ expectation and actual outcomes of an event, or deviation between
personal endeavors and objective facts. In Gulliver’s Travels, the plot development is often the opposite
of what readers expect. Third, dramatic irony is when words and actions possess a significance that the
listener or audience understands, but the speaker or character does not.

Swift also uses contrast as a rhetorical device to construct satirical effects. In order to reach the purpose
of satire, he puts contradictory subjects together to describe and compare. There are at least three
evident pairs of contrasting subjects. First is Gulliver and Lilliputians. They differ hugely in figures and in
characters. The height of Gulliver’s body exceeds Lilliputians’ in the proportion of twelve to one. As to
character differences, Gulliver is kind-hearted and grateful with a sense of justice, whereas Lilliputians
are more cunning. They want to make full use of Gulliver in the war fought with its conflicting country:
Blefuscu. He helps them against invasion from it but refuses to serve for them in their invasive territory
expansion. Second, in Part II, figures of the citizens and Gulliver’s again form a stark contrast. In
Brobdingnag, he is put in a carriage and carried to the marketplace to perform his “tricks”. He tries to
please those giants by showing them his little coins and perform “tricks” with his sword. He comes into
conflict with the Queen’s favorite dwarf and they scheme against each other. On the other hand, the
erudite King of Brobdingnag governs his country with reason, common sense, justice and mercy. The
political system in Brobdingnag is very ideal and orderly, in which law guarantees freedom and welfare
of the nationals. Gulliver introduces to the King England’s society and political system and embellishes
the truth. He describes how great England is, how judicious the politics is and how just the law is.
However, he could barely defend himself facing the King’s question. Besides, the comparison between the
King’s liberal governance and rule under England’s bourgeois class reveals corruption of its politics.
Third, the ruling class of the country of the Houyhnhnms are horse-like beings of reason, justice and
honesty, whereas the ruled class (yahoos) are heinous, greedy and pugnacious creatures. The contrast
between the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos is extreme. The horses are clean and sweet-smelling; their diet
is temperate and vegetarian. Their habits constitute the temperance that the eighteenth century thought
characterized reasonable man. The Yahoos, on the other hand, are human in form and feature. They are
filthy and they stink. They are omnivorous but seem to prefer meat and garbage.
 Swift uses mock seriousness and understatement; he parodies and burlesques; he presents a virtue and
then turns it into a vice. He takes pot-shots at all sorts of sacred cows. Besides science, Swift debunks the
whole sentimental attitude surrounding children. At birth, for instance, Lilliputian children were "wisely"
taken from their parents and given to the State to rear. In an earlier satire (A Modest Proposal), he had
proposed that the very poor in Ireland sell their children to the English as gourmet food.

Swift is also a name-caller. Mankind, as he has a Brobdingnagian remark, is "the most pernicious race of
little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." Swift also inserted
subtly hidden puns into some of his name-calling techniques. The island of Laputa, the island of pseudo-
science, is literally (in Spanish) the land of "the whore." Science, which learned people of his generation
were venerating as a goddess, Swift labeled a whore, and devoted a whole hook to illustrating the
ridiculous behavior of her converts.

In addition, Swift mocks blind devotion. Gulliver, leaving the Houyhnhnms, says that he "took a second
leave of my master, but as I was going to prostrate myself to kiss his hoof, he did me the honor to raise it
gently to my mouth." Swift was indeed so thorough a satirist that many of his early readers misread the
section on the Houyhnhnms. They were so enamored of reason that they did not realize that Swift was
metamorphosing a virtue into a vice. In Book IV, Gulliver has come to idealize the horses. They embody
pure reason, but they are not human. Literally, of course, we know they are not, but figuratively they
seem an ideal for humans — until Swift exposes them as dull, unfeeling creatures, thoroughly unhuman.
They take no pleasure in sex, nor do they ever overflow with either joy or melancholy. They are
bloodless.

He therefore offered up the impractical scientists of Laputa and the impersonal, but absolutely
reasonable, Houyhnhnms as embodiments of science and reason carried to ridiculous limits. Swift, in fact,
created the whole of Gulliver's Travels in order to give the public a new moral lens. Through this lens,
Swift hoped to "vex" his readers by offering them new insights into the game of politics and into the social
follies of humans.

Satirical targets in Part 1

Swift’s satirical attacks on humanity are relatively mild in Book 1. Disgust for human in this book is not
yet detectable and apparent. A series of amusing and ridiculous happenings in this part provide readers a
relaxed atmosphere. For example, the part describing how Gulliver saves the palace and the emperor’s
wife is hilarious.

I had the evening before drunk plentifully of a most delicious wine, called glimigrim (the Blefuscudians
call it flunec, but ours is esteemed the better sort) which is very diuretic. By the luckiest chance in the
world, I had not discharged myself of any part of it. The heat I had contracted by coming very near the
flames, and by labouring to quench them, made the white wine begin to operate by urine; which I voided in
such a quantity, and applied so well to the proper places, that in three minutes the fire was wholly
extinguished, and the rest of that noble pile, which had cost so many ages in erecting, preserved from
destruction. (Swift 2007: 25)

Many descriptions in Part I employs the technique of verbal irony. For instance, in Chapter III, Swift
ridicules the Lilliputians’ arrogance and ignorance by describing how mathematicians in Lilliput measure
Gulliver’s height by the help of a quadrant. They “having taken the height of my body by the help of a
quadrant, and finding it to exceed theirs in the proportion of twelve to one, they concluded from the
similarity of their bodies, that mine must contain at least 1728 of theirs, and consequently would require
as much food as was necessary to support that number of Lilliputians.” Swift ridicules, “by which the
reader may conceive an idea of the ingenuity of that people, as well as the prudent and exact economy of
so great a prince.” He makes good use of the technique of verbal irony in this this laughable, thought-
provoking and seemingly ordinary ironic narration to achieve satirical effects. In Chapter V, despite the
fact that the conflict between Lilliput and Blefuscu is blatantly ridiculous, Gulliver depicts it with total
seriousness. The tone with which Gulliver tells the story is serious. However, the more serious he is the
more ridiculous and laughable the conflict is. This again is the employment of verbal irony. Swift expects
us to understand that the history Gulliver relates parallels European history. The High-Heels and the
Low-Heels correspond to the Whigs and Tories of English politics. Lilliput and Blefuscu represent England
and France. The conflict between Big-Endians and Little-Endians represents the Protestant Reformation
and the centuries of warfare between Catholics and Protestants. Through these representations, the
author implies that the differences between Protestants and Catholics, between Whigs and Tories, and
between France and England are as silly and meaningless as how a person chooses to crack an egg. The egg
controversy is ridiculous because there cannot be any right or wrong way to crack an egg. Therefore, it is
unreasonable to legislate how people must do it. Similarly, we may conclude that there is no right or wrong
way to worship God—at least, there is no way to prove that one way is right and another way is wrong.
The Big-Endians and Little-Endians both share the same religious text, but they disagree on how to
interpret a passage that can be interpreted in two ways. By mentioning this incident, Swift is suggesting
that the Christian Bible can be interpreted in more than one way and that it is ludicrous for people to
fight over how to interpret it when no one can really be certain that one interpretation is right and the
others are wrong.

In these chapters, Gulliver experiences Lilliputian culture, and the great difference in size between him
and the Lilliputians is emphasized by a few examples through which the author’s satires of British
government are explicitly expressed. For instance, government officials in Liliput are chosen by their skill
at rope-dancing, which Gulliver regards as arbitrary and ludicrous. Clearly, Swift intends for us to
understand this episode as a satire of England’s system of political appointment and to infer that
England’s system is similarly arbitrary.

The difference in size between Gulliver and the Lilliputians reflects the importance of physical power, a
theme that recurs throughout the novel. Gulliver begins to gain the trust of Lilliputians over time, but it
is unnecessary: Gulliver could crush them simply by walking carelessly. Despite the evidence in front of
them, they never recognize their own insignificance. This is clearly the use of dramatic irony in which the
reader knows the truth but the characters in the stories deny it. They keep Gulliver tied up, thinking
that he is under control, while in fact he could destroy them effortlessly. In this way, Swift satirizes
humanity’s pretensions to power and significance .

Swiftian Satires in Part II

Compared with Book I, Swift’s satire is more clearly implied in the second book and attacks on political
issues and humanity are more apparent. It is evident that Swift begins to express his discontent over
Europe as the world’s dominant power and its practice of colonialism in this section if the historical
context is considered. Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels at a time when Europe was the world’s dominant
power and when England was rising in power with its formidable fleet. The English founded their first
colony Virginia in America in 1585 due to competition with the Spanish. Then they continued the process
of colonization and expansion throughout the world.
In this section, Gulliver’s initial adventure in Brobdingnag is not so desirable. At first, the farmer almost
tramples on him. The family virtually enslaves him, making him to perform tricks to paying visitors. “This
enslavement emphasizes the fundamental humanity of the Brobdingnagians-just like Europeans, they are
happy to make a quick buck when the opportunity arises–and also makes concrete Gulliver’s lowly status.”
Swift also “plays with language in a way that both emphasizes his main satirical points about politics,
ethics, and culture and makes fun of language itself.” (SparkNotes Editors, 2003). In the beginning of
this adventure, Gulliver uses naval jargons (“sprit-sail”, “fore-sail”, “mizen”, “fore-sheet”, “downhaul”) to
depict the various attempts his ship makes to deal with the great storm at sea. The description is
complicated and full of obscurities. One probably cannot help wondering why Swift bothered writing
these difficult-to-understand words since they seems with the least importance to the whole story.
However, it is not a waste of effort. The words are meant to be incomprehensible–“the point is to satirize
the jargon used by writers of travel books and sailing accounts, which in Swift’s view was often overblown
and ridiculous.” (SparkNotes Editors, 2003) By making Gulliver use jargon to such an extreme, Swift
mocks those who would try to “demonstrate their expertise through convoluted language”. Mockeries like
this one repeats elsewhere in the novel. Swift’s main purpose is to “criticize the validity of various kinds
of expert knowledge that are more showy than helpful, whether legal, naval, or, as in the third voyage,
scientific.”(SparkNotes Editors, 2003).

Swiftian satires in Part III

Swift’s satires in the third book shift focus from ethic and political aspects to academic field, since most
part of this section contributes to description of impractical scientific experiments and workings of
certain things. For instance, descriptions Gulliver makes about the technique used to move the island are
convoluted. Also, “The method of assigning letters to parts of a mechanism and then describing the
movement of these parts from one point to another resembles the mechanistic philosophical and
scientific descriptions of Swift’s time.” (SparkNotes Editors, 2003). From these, Swift again successfully
satirizes specialized language in academic field.

Laputa is more complex than Lilliput or Brobdingnag because its strangeness is not based on differences
of size but instead on the primacy of abstract theoretical concerns over concrete practical concerns in
Laputan culture. However, physical power is still an important factor in Laputa. Here, power is exercised
not through physical size but through technology. The government floats over the rest of the kingdom,
using technology to control its subjects. The floating island represents the distance between the
government and the people it governs. The king is oblivious to the real concerns of the people below. He
has never even been there. The noble men and scientists of the island are also far removed from the
people and their concerns. Abstract theory dominates all aspects of Laputan life, from language to
architecture to geography.

Swift continues his mockery of academics by describing the projects carried out in the cities below
Laputa. The academy serves to create entirely useless projects while the people stare outside its walls.
Each project described, such as the extraction of sunbeams from a cucumber, is not only false but also
purposeless. Even if its scientific foundation were correct, it would still serve no real purpose for the
people meant to gain from it. The result is a society in which science is promoted for no real reason and
time is wasted as a matter of course. This again is the use of dramatic irony where the reader knows
certainly that those scientific projects are a waste of time while the scientists in the story are striving
for success of the experiments.
Swiftian satires in Part IV

In the fourth part, disgust for human is expressed to such an extreme that readers often feel
uncomfortable reading this section. Swift deflates humankind very straightforwardly by portraying the
Yahoos humanlike and associating humankind with Yahoos. Gulliver tells the horse that in his country, the
Yahoos are the governing creatures. Moreover, after he introduces Europe to his horse-like master, he
admits that Gulliver’s humans have different systems of learning, law, government, and art but says that
their natures are not different from those of the Yahoos.

For example, in this part, Gulliver’s crewmembers mutiny when they are near Leeward Islands and he is
abandoned in an unknown land–the country of the Houyhnhnms. The Houyhnhnms are horse-like, physically
strong and virtuous beings. Gulliver is regarded as likable as a yahoo by them. He tries to prove to the
Houyhnhnms that he is not a Yahoo in nature although he looks like one. He talks at length about wars
fought for “religious reasons”, England’s legal system, and his great love of his native country. However,
the more he tries to cover up human flaws, the more they are known when he is questioned by the
Houyhnhnms. The readers’ expectation may be Gulliver’s stay in the country of the Houyhnhnms for his
feverish passion for the Houyhnhnms. However, at last, they conclude that Gulliver is a yahoo in disguise
because he has all traits a yahoo possesses and refuse his request to live there.

Gulliver undergoes a stage of transform in book four, where he develops a love for the Houyhnhnms to
the point that he does not want to return to humankind. He has an identity crisis although he is not aware
of it. He thinks of his friends and family as Yahoolike, but forgets that he comes from “English Yahoos”.
The Houyhnhnms think that Gulliver is some kind of Yahoo, though superior to the rest of his species. He
asks them to stop using that word to refer to him, and they consent. This once again expresses disgust
for human.

While he had been among tiny people in Lilliput, Gulliver is tiny himself in Brobdingnag, where the
inhabitants are sixty feet tall giants and the rest is adjusted to the same scale. In Brobdingnag, the
human reality reveals itself as ridiculous and infinitely small. Whereas the Lilliputians were hostile to
Gulliver on his arrival, he is treated kindly by the giants. Swift applies the focus of relativity to the
two strange worlds where the physical size of the inhabitants represents their intellectual and moral
size. Now all the loves, hates, prides, wars are as petty and trivial as man himself. When Gulliver
gives him an account of the political, administrative and judicial system operating in England, the
king points out possibilities of corruption and injustice in it. It is seen that the giants of Brobdingng
are intellectual and moral giants while the world of Gulliver is a world of moral and intellectual
pygmies.

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STRUCTURE-
 In the Introduction, we got a brief idea of the plot of the novel, which is divided into four books, each
giving an account of a voyage experienced by a sailor, Lemuel Gulliver, when he visited a strange and
unknown land. Thus, in Book I, we read an account of his experience when he visited Lilliput, a land
inhabited by people who are six inches tall. In Book II, Swift describes Gulliver's voyage to Brobdingnag,
the land of giants. Book III describes Gulliver's strange experience in Laputa, where the people are
preoccupied with scientific experiments but seem to be quite irrational. In Book IV, Swift describes
Gulliver's voyage to a strange land where he meets a noble race of horses, the Houyhnhnms, and the
disgusting Yahoos, who resemble human beings.

In Book I, Gulliver in Lilliput comes across a people who are six inches tall and their emperor tall just by
the breadth of a nail. Their physical size represents their moral and intellectual size. They are the worst
embodiments of pride, pettiness, malice, cruelty, and ingratitude. In Book II, Gulliver goes to
Brobdingnag, where the inhabitants are ten times his size. Their physical height represents their moral
and intellectual height. They are generous, hospitable, and thus, the reverse of Lilliputians. Book III
describes Gulliver's adventures in Laputa, inhabited by people who are obsessed by abstract sciences
and speculations. Their houses are clumsy and their fields are wastelands. It is a satire on the useless
application to futile projects by the scientists of the day. Book IV, describes the voyage to the land of
the Houyhnhnms, and in it, Swift has a surprise in store for the reader. Gulliver sees horses, the
Houyhnhnms and Yahoos, the men-like creatures who serve them. What is surprising is that the horses
are rational and noble, while the Yahoos are repulsive and beastly.

What is "mock utopia" and how much is it true for "Gulliver's Travels"?
A "mock utopia" is a place that seems utopic—or whose citizens believe it to be utopic—but underneath
has flaws that gradually become apparent. Aldous Huxley's World State in Brave New World is a classic
mock utopia. It is engineered to make everyone "happy," but the price is the human soul.

In Gulliver's Travels, the Houyhyhnhnms, who are intelligent horses, appear to have created a utopic,
perfect society, and Gulliver certainly comes to believe they have. The Houyhyhnhnms live in complete
order and peace, basing all their decision-making on rationality. They have no words for lying because
they don't lie, finding it irrational to do so. Gulliver finds this society far superior to his own.

The Houyhyhnhnms, however, turn out to be too rational, for they lack emotion and for that reason, don't
necessarily value life or have any special attachment to their offspring or anyone else. For example, each
Houyhyhnhnm couple is supposed to raise one girl and one boy, so if they have two children of the same
sex, they simply bring them to their society's annual meeting and trade with another couple for a child of
the opposite sex. Humans would probably have trouble with that concept. Further, they don't mourn
death: Gulliver, for instance, meets a Houyhyhnhnm woman who comes calmly to lunch right after
burying her husband at sea. This passionlessness can be troubling.

We are meant to critique Gulliver's excessive reaction to leaving their culture and returning to England,
where he tries to live in a barn with horses.