Gulliver's Travels Analysis

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To begin with Gulliver’s Travels as a satire,Due to the restoration period the early eighteenth century was a good time for haters.along with alexander pope, Jonathan Swift the greatest writer of satire that English literature has ever seen. Swift saw the book as politically explosive, and therefore as something that he had to present and position quite carefully in order to avoid prosecution. “Gulliver is neither a fully developed character nor even an altogether distinguishable persona; rather, he is a satiric device enabling Swift to score satirical points” (Rodino 124). Indeed, whereas the work begins with more specific satire, attacking perhaps one political machine or aimed at one particular custom in each instance, it finishes with “the…show more content…
His next journey brings him to Brobdingnag, where his situation is reversed: now he is the midget in a land of giants. His third journey leads him to Laputa, the floating island, inhabited by strange (although similarly sized) beings who derive their whole culture from music and mathematics. Gulliver’s fourth and final journey places him in the land of the Houyhnhnm, a society of intelligent, reasoning horses. As Swift leads Gulliver on these four fantastical journeys, Gulliver’s perceptions of himself and the people and things around him change, giving Swift ample opportunity to inject into the story both irony and satire of the England of his day and of the human condition. As Swift’s story of Gulliver unfolds, the satire begins to take a much more general focus: humanity as a whole. Gulliver manages to escape the land of miniature, and after a brief stay in England, returns to the sea. Again, he finds himself in a strange land, but this time, he is the small one, with everything around him many times the normal size. Unlike the Lilliputians, however, he is alone in this…show more content…
Gulliver doesn’t remain long on the island of Laputa. It is during Gulliver’s fourth journey that Swift’s satire reaches its pinnacle, where “Swift put his most biting, hard lines, that speak against not only the government, but human nature itself” (Glicksman). In this journey, Gulliver comes to the land of the Houyhnhnms, which are creatures that look like horses but have the ability to reason. Also in this land are the Yahoos, of which Gulliver could only say that “Upon the whole, I never beheld in all my travels so disagreeable an animal, nor one against which I naturally conceived so strong an antipathy” (IV.i.263). With great irony, Swift brings Gulliver into contact with a Yahoo once again. “My horror and astonishment are not to be described, when I observed in this abdominal animal a perfect human figure” (IV.ii.269-270). Indeed, Gulliver finds that the only difference between himself and the Yahoo to be the Yahoo’s lack of cleanliness and clothes; otherwise, a Yahoo would be indistinguishably human. With this line, Swift’s satire achieves its goal, and shows that the flaws of humanity are overwhelming, and let to continue, result in a total degradation of the human. Furthermore, satire is shown through the plot of journey and return. The Lilliputians symbolize humankind’s widely
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