Jonathan Swift

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4. Gulliver's Travels

The novel is a satire by Swift published in 1726.

The story Comment

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The story

It consists of four voyages. The island of Lilliput Brobdingnag The flying island of Laputa The country of the Houyhnhnms

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The island of Lilliput In the first voyage, Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon on a

merchant ship, relates his shipwreck on the island of Lilliput, the inhabitants of which are six inches high, everything on the island being in the proportion of an inch to a foot as compared with things as we know them. Owing to this diminutive scale, the pomp of the emperor, the civil feuds of the inhabitants, the war with their neighbours across the channel, are made to look ridiculous. The English political parties and religious dissensions are satirized in the description of the wearers of high heels and low heels, and of the controversy on the question whether eggs should be broken at the big or small end.

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Brobdingnag In the second voyage, Gulliver is accidentally

left ashore on Brobdingnag, where the inhabitants are as tall as steeples, and everything else is in proportion. Here the king, after inquiring into the manners, government, and learning of Europe, sums up his impression of what Gulliver tells him as follows: “ By what I have gathered from your own relation … I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. ”

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The flying island of Laputa The third voyage is occupied with a visit to the flying island of

Laputa, and its neighbouring continent and capital Lagado. Here the satire is directed against philosophers, men of science, historians, and projectors, with special reference to the South Sea Company. In Laputa Gulliver finds the wise men so wrapped up in their speculations as to be utter dotards in practical affairs. At Lagado he visits the Academy of Projectors, where professors are engaged in extracting sunshine from cucumbers and similar absurd enterprises. In the Island of Sorcerers, he is enabled to call up the great men of old and discovers, from their answers to his questions, the deceptions of history. The Struldbrugs, a race endowed with immortality, so far from finding this a boon, turn out to be the most miserable of mankind.

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The country of the Houyhnhnms

In the fourth voyage, Swift describes the country of the Houyhnhnms, who are horses endowed with reason; their rational, clean, and simple society is contrasted with the filthiness and brutality of the Yahoos, beasts in human shape whose human vices Gulliver is reluctantly forced to recognize. So alienated is he from his own species that when he finally returns home he recoils from his own family in disgust.

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Comments on Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver's Travels was an immediate success and was read from the cabinet council to the nursery; it continues to appeal to readers of all ages, both as a travel book and as a powerful satire, although many find themselves repelled or disturbed by the darkness of Swift's vision, particularly in the last book, which, Thackeray described as “ furious, raging, obscene. ”

　　 From the analysis of the four parts of the novel, we can see that the author exposes various forms of evils in his society, by ridiculing the pomp of the rulers, the contradictions between political parties and religious dissensions, criticizing the manners, government and welfare system in Britain, satirizing various impractical research and false devotion in the academic field, and expressing his disgust for humans, especially the folly, the brutality and filthiness of human beings.

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Gulliver's Travels

movie

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