Gullivers travels Essay Example For Students

Gullivers travels Essay Gulliver makes no comment or criticism of the Houyhnhnms actions, but only praises them on education and reason. Despite these praises, we later discover their lack of knowledge outside their own country and lifestyle, For, as he had no conception of any country besides his own, so he could not be expert in distinguishing remote objects at sea, as we who so much converse in that element. 8 Here we see a critical conception of the Houyhnhnms and a self-involved, almost arrogant nature, again Swift hints at other human failings, but Gulliver simply dismisses them as quirks of this race. Now, the first important question to ask of any satirist is how he or she achieves the necessary comic distortion, which transforms the familiar into the ridiculous. And Swift’s main technique for achieving thisand a wonderful technique for satireis the basic plot of science fiction: the voyage by an average civilized human being into unknown territory and his return back home. This apparently simple plot immediately opens all sorts of satiric possibilities, because it enables the writer constantly to play off three different perspectives in order to give us the reader a comic sense of what is very familiar. It can do this in the following ways:If the strange new country is recognizably similar to our culture, then comic distortions in the New World enable the writer to satirize the familiar in a host of different ways, providing, in effect, a cartoon style view of our world. If the strange new country is some sort of utopiaa perfectly realized vision of the ideals often procl aimed but generally violated in our worldthen the satirist can manipulate the discrepancy between the ideal New World of the fiction and the corrupt world we live in to illustrate repeatedly just how empty the pretensions to goodness really are in our world. However, the key to this technique is generally the use of the traveler, the figure who is, in effect, the reader’s contemporary and fellow countryman. How that figure reacts to the New World can be a constant source of amusement and pointed satiric comment, because, in effect, this figure represents the contact between the normal world and the strange New World of either caricatured ridiculousness or utopian perfection. We can see Swift moving back and forth between the first two techniques, and this can create some confusion. For example, in much of Book I, Lilliput is clearly a comic distortion of life in Europe. The sections on the public rewards of leaping and creeping or the endless disputes about whether one should eat one’s eggs by breaking them at the bigger or the smaller end or the absurdity of the royal proclamations are obvious and funny distortions of the court life, the pompous pretentiousness of officials, and the religious disputes familiar to Swift’s readers. At the same time, however, there are passages where he holds up the laws of Lilliput as some form of utopian ideal, in order to demonstrate just how much better they understand true reasonableness than do the Europeans. In book II, he does the same: for most of the time the people of Brobdingnag are again caricatured distorted Europeans, but clearly, the King of Brobdingnag is an ideal figure. Difference of psychopath and psychotic EssayIn the first three books of the Travels, Swift has exposed satiric ridicule to the institutions, the customs, the beliefs, and the behavior of man. In Book IV, however, he turns his attention to human nature itself. He seeks to discover what might be called a definition of man; a definition that will account for the apparent mess man has managed to make of his life and his world. Swift therefore places Gulliver (an ordinary mortal) directly between the figures of impossible perfection, the Houyhnhnms, and the figures of impossible degradation, the Yahoos. Gulliver is shaken to the core of his being when he suddenly sees, in the Yahoos, the terrible sight of man as animal. The Yahoos are images of what man would become were he totally devoid of reason and completely removed from civilization: they are images of the animal potential in man. The fact is, however, that man is neither Yahoo nor Houyhnhnm; he is an imperfect creature who, nevertheless, has the power to live a decent life if only he will recognize how limited he is. Swift presents us with figures like Count Munodi and Captain Mendez who are decent, compassionate, wise and humble men who have become aware of their capabilities only by recognizing their limitations. Without pride, these figures live the kind of good life attainable by humanity. Gulliver, however, goes mad when he realizes that man is incapable of absolute perfection. Unable to come to terms with his limited capabilities, he thus commits the sin of pride as he is in the very process of condemning man for being proud. Ironically, Gulliver’s madness†¦his own pride†¦proves how imperfect a creature man is. The tragedy is that, in the name of perfection, Gulliver misses the opportunity to achieve whatever goodness is in his power to attain. Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels is the most famous and most powerful protest against this modern project. The severity of his anger is, I think, a symptom of the extent to which he realized the battle was already being lost. To us, however, over two hundred years later, Swift’s point is perhaps more vividly relevant than many of his contemporaries.