Growth of Gulliver’s Madness
The journey to the country of the Houyhnhnms in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels presents to the reader a sub sequential growth of madness which is fictional. Swift style of writing was satiric and can be said to be Utopian in the message he intends to portray. The use of Houyhnhnms and Yahoos reveals much about the imaginary way of presenting a subject across to an audience.
An endeavor, such as the one taken by Gulliver always comes with a risk. Considering the fact that he was not content with his human nature, and demonstrated his preference for animals and their set of organization. One may ask why Gulliver preferred the lifestyle of horses to that of men. Answering this question, gives us a lead to track the madness that evolved as he went along this journey. Gulliver was unsatisfied with the state of affairs in his own country and was looking for a country which is Utopian with what he had. His anger was first against the authority of the land, the Kings and Queens, the religious set up and how these authorities proclaim laws and procedures that don’t favor the masses. To some extent it can be said that Jonathan Swift who chose this satirical method of writing was an agent of change for the ordinary people.
The ordinary people were characterizing with a symbol which was affectionately called the Houyhnhnms and referred to as the horses. Jonathan Swift was an academical, a Philosopher who is trying to associate himself with the commons in the British society. This behavior did not only absurd and strange but can be thought of as madness. Gulliver went out of the ordinary and acceptable way of doing things. Swift stated that,” Upon the whole, the behavior of these animal...
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...on. Gulliver did have some struggles returning to associate himself again with Yahoos like Don Pedro de Mendez who encouraged him to go back to his wife and family. Gulliver declares,”I compelled myself to tolerate the sight of Yahoos, and to converse with Don Pedro de Mendez; yet my memory and imaginations were perpetually filled with the virtues and ideas of those exalted Houyhnhnhms.”(337).
To be yourself is better than to seem to be what you are not. This how Gulliver in his travel struggled with and had to come back to accept the terms of his true nature. The growth of madness that traced in Swift’s satire is absolutely the pressure and what it takes to make changes the status quo which is much preserved by the elite in society. Somebody must be the voice of the voiceless and this is an instrument that will bring about the necessarily change.
Jonathan Swift wrote his book Gulliver’s Travels in the first half of the 1720’s. At the time he was writing much more of the “new world” had been explored and colonized, giving Swift with the ability to create a traveller to poke fun at and critique the men who had previously made themselves out to be heroes by creating a fiction often more believable than the supposed truths. Gulliver’s admiration for other societies resembles that of Hythloday and his experience in Utopia. Both of these book show how writers back in Europe wished the explorers would have been more earnest in their descriptions of societies in the new world. Swift especially used his book to comment on the current state of Europe and its politics in the new world.
In the writing's of the Jonathan Swift we can clearly see issues and concepts with regard to morality, ethics and relations come into play in our society and in Gulliver's Travels, Swift brings those issues to the for front for everyone to see and analyze. The very concepts and beliefs that man holds dear Swift attacks and strongly justifies his literary aggression thought the construct of the society of the Houyhnahnms who truly leads a just and humane society that we as humans (Yahoos) have the faintest concept of. As I will later point out, Swift also deals with human ignorance and the overall belief that nothing in this earth can be more civilized and exert more reason then us. He uses the characters of the Houyhnahnms to demonstrate our inadequacies and overall failures to exert and practice true reason. Issues such as war, corruption, rape, homosexuality, lying (false representation), slavery, bribery, greed, and murder does not exist in a society that understands the true meaning of reason. We can clearly see the metamorphosis of Gulliver from is departure from his wife and children to being mutinied to his initial encounter with the Yahoos as well as the Houyhnahnms, to his experiences over a 5 year period in his interactions with the Houyhnhnms to his departure and return home to his wife and kids we can clearly see the change from a man (yahoo) to a Houyhnhnm (in spirit). So as we take a closer look at Gulliver's travels, we will see that the Voyage of the Houyhnhnm is about change, understanding, and clarity of oneself, his beliefs, morals and values.
By having the Houyhnhnms speak and talk, its shows Gulliver the truth in the world and how he lives among a savage race, mankind. Boris Ford comments on Swift in his article “The Limitations of the Houyhnhms”: ‘In the real world the gift of reason is bestowed upon human beings and withheld from animals. In the land of the Houyhnhnms reason has been given to horses and withheld from--.’ Ford fills in the blank with “…withheld from human beings”, which Swift does to make the reader question what makes people ‘human’ and if they compare to that of a savage (Ford 148). Swift does this by bringing down the status of humans by comparing them to that of a Yahoo, a being less intellectual than that of a Houyhnhms. Even if Houyhnhms know that they outsmart...
Finally the book and film differs at the final part where in the Text, Gulliver is sent to exile. The Text says that it was a travel Gulliver had decided to take; no matter what, and that he knew the consequences as he is sent to exile by the Blefuscubian army after having dishonored the Lilliput realm. However, this type of ending does not relate to the audience, Thus these final main features of the book are blinded and presented in the film yet in another way where Gulliver returns to Manhattan, New York with his new girlfriend and lives the rest of his life happily ever after, obviously amended to suit the taste of 21th century audience.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol C. 9th ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012. 2492-2633. Print.
Past the political satire and laughable motifs in the book Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, the purpose of this story is to show everything ignoble and tactless of the human species in general and that humans are truly disgusting. Also exploring the idea of a utopia. Swift uses the literary device of political satire to show how childish and ignorant human acts were. This is because during Swift's time in the eighteenth century, Britain was modernizing at this time. The reader follows the four narrative travels of the main character, Lemuel Gulliver. Each of the four voyages Gulliver has traveled to, is a different society that portrays one of the main ideals of the eighteenth century in Britain. The four places Gulliver has traveled to were Lilliput; being Gulliver's first voyage, Brobdingnag; his second voyage, Laputa; the third voyage, and lastly to the land of the Houyhnhms; being his last voyage and afterwards traveling back home to England. The experience from being exposed to these four societies has had a huge impact on how Gulliver now sees humans.
Throughout these two parts, we see Gulliver as an adventurous man who wants to see everything that has been created in the world. During his second adventure Gulliver sees the opposite side of the spectrum and has to fend for his life because of his small size, which causes him to lose his view of human size when he goes back to England. In addition, he starts to defend England in his talks, which is totally opposite of how he started. In part four we see the biggest change in Gulliver, he has lost a grip on reality and no longer wants to accept the fact that he is what he is and looks like a Yahoo. In part two and four of Gulliver’s Travels, we see changes within Gulliver.
In the fourth voyage, Swift presents a case study for opposing states of nature, with the Yahoos representing the argument that man is governed by his passions, seeking his own advantage, pursuing pleasures and avoiding pain, and the Houyhnhnms representing the argument that man is governed by reason. If this is the case, then Swift’s misanthropy was such that he saw men as the foul and disgusting Yahoos, and made it plain that reform of the species was out of the question. A major fault with this theory is that it leaves no place for Gulliver. When attention is drawn to the figure of Gulliver himself, as distinct from his creator, Swift, he is taken to be the moral of the story. If you can't be a Houyhnhnm you don't need to be a Yahoo; just try to be like Gulliver. The trouble with this idea is that when taking a closer look at Gulliver, he isn't worth emulating. The final picture of him talking with the horses in the stable for four hours a day, unable to stand the company of his own family, makes him look foolish. Another theory is that Gulliver made a mistake in regarding the Houyhnhnms as models to be emulated: so far from being admirable creatures they are as repulsive as the Yahoos. The Yahoos might be ruled by their passions, but these have no human passions at all. On this view, Swift was not advocating, but attacking reason.
In the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift uses satire to draw reader’s attention towards his concerns about humanity and uses irony to reveal his cynical views towards human kind. According to the Great Chain of Being, a term developed by the Renaissance that describes a divinely hierarchical order in every existing thing in the universe, human beings are placed a tier higher than animals (http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english /melani/cs6/ren.html). However, by comparing human traits with unpleasant qualities of animals, Swift blurs the definition of human being and questions the hierarchical place of human. In the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver starts his journey as a well-educated European person who is considered to be a decent example of humanity. The first group of inhabitants Gulliver finds on the island where he is dropped off on are the Yahoos. Gulliver is disgusted by the behaviours of these wild creatures at first and he considers them to be animals that are owned by the dominate beings on this island. Gulliver then discovers the Houyhnhnms whom he perceives as brute beasts (Swift 2420) and animals (ibid.) because they share similar physical qualities compare to the horses in England. After a brief interaction with the two Houyhnhnms, Gulliver is taken to the house of a Houyhnhnm whom he will later refer to as his master. Through the interactions with the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver is able to show the ability to reason even though he shares some physical similarities with the Yahoos. Due to this quality and the fact that the Houyhnhnms cannot see his bare skin under his clothes, he is able to live with the Houyhnhnms. Gulliver starts to relate himself more to the Houyhnhnms than the Yahoos becau...
Feigning sickness, Gulliver travels with Glumdalclitch and, fortunately, is picked up by an eagle and transported into English waters. By chance, an eagle transports Gulliver back to English waters to be rescued. Upon seeing Englishmen again, he remarks them as being pigmies after being used to seeing Brobdingnagians all the time. Gulliver’s perception of the world has changed during his visit to Brobdingnag. On his return home, it seemed as if he was the giant now. He begins to think of his people as contemptible little creatures just as how the Brobdingnagians thought of him. He even remarks that he could not look at himself while in Brobdingnag. “For indeed while I was in that prince’s country, I could never endure to look in a glass after my eyes had been accustomed to such prodigious objects, because the comparison gave me so despicable a conceit of myself” (Swift 149). Gulliver’s views have started to change, foreshadowing his result at the end of the
In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver learns that experiencing different lifestyles he thought were better than his own actually makes him appreciate his own life with a more meaningful disposition through his journeys to Lilliput, Brobdingnag, and the Country of the Houyhnhnms. Gulliver’s journey to Lilliput effectuated forlorn feelings of his home. Likewise, Gulliver’s trek to Brobdingnag assists in his realization that changing perspectives also alter his attitude towards his homeland. Finally, Gulliver’s expedition to the Country of Houyhnhnms, where horses act civilized on and people act like wild animals. Gulliver soon learns that through his mystical journeys that changing the perspective in which he views the world reverses feelings of gratefulness towards his home. Gulliver’s first journey set sail to the Lilliputians on May 4th, 1699.
After a series of different looks at society through the first three voyages, Gulliver travels to Houyhnhnmland where the nature of people themselves are given the strongest censure, by being directly paralleled with the loathsome Yahoos. Here Swift bluntly attacks almost every aspect of society, which is then compared to the Yahoos point by point by the Grey Mare. Gulliver and the reader finally identify themselves completely with the Yahoos (see close commentary), and Gulliver decides to abandon Yahooism forever. But, he is then immediately banished from the island by the Houyhnhnm assembly.
Gulliver's Travels is a great novel written by Jonthan Swift. It is about voyages of Gulliver-main character-to different countries. Gulliver's Travels is a political allegory of England at Swift's time. the word allegory means a simple that can be objects, characters, figures or colors used to represent an abstract idea or concepts. Swift uses this novel to criticize the political condition of England at the 18th century and to make a satire of the royal court of George 1 . Gulliver's Travels has established itself as a classic for young people. Its appeal to young minds is due to the fact that it is, on the surface, an adventure story of strange wonderful lands. As a matter of fact, it is taken by the mature reader as an allegory work of England at Swift's time.
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels presents a narrator, Lemuel Gulliver, who recounts his various sea voyages to fantastical lands. During each voyage, Gulliver encounters different societies and customs to which Gulliver must adjust to. in order to be accepted into their society The entire novel serves as a commentary on how people everywhere have a tendency to abuse the power given to them.
In Gulliver’s Travel, a novel written by Jonathan Swift, there are many political themes and satirical descriptions of the English government. During Swift’s time, the early 1700s, the Tory government and the Whig government opposed each other. Hoping that they would appoint him to the Church of England, Swift joined the Tories, but he was not appointed to the position by the Queen. When Tory government was in trouble for treason with the French, the Whig government took over, and Swift left politics to publish Gulliver’s Travel to show the disagreements between the two parties and between the Protestant English and the Catholic French, who did not agree on religious values. Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travel also to show his idealized vision for the English society. In the novel, Swift criticizes the government as he narrates the adventures which Gulliver experiences at different islands with foreign and unique groups of people. In a way, Swift creates utopian societies at the Lillitupian Island and the Brobdingnag Island to exhibit the imperfection of government that existed in England. As Gulliver, Swift’s main character, interacts with these societies, he criticizes some of their customs and laws. He notices that these societies are not utopian from his perspective. Although there are many themes throughout Gulliver’s Travels, this paper will focus on part one and two examining the utopian societies Swift creates for Gulliver to experience through his interactions with the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagian people system of government.