An Analysis Of Gulliver's Travels

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Recommended: Satire in gullivers travels by jonathan swift

Zach Lane
Ms. Seltzer
English 3 Honors
12 May 2014
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
The significance of the name of this book is the Travels. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, England the world's center for sailing, navigation, and exploration. Accounts of distant lands had grown very widespread, so much so that this kind of story became an extremely popular. Swift adapts the form of the adventure’s narratives to give his harsh view of both England and human nature. Which makes Gulliver's Travels a satire in which human weakness is held up for readers to laugh at.
Gulliver is the center of the novel: not only because he tells the story, but also because he’s the only character who isn’t completely boring. Gulliver's Travels is a combination of cunning insults, dirty words, and big ideas, most lot of which are from Gulliver. Gulliver gives us the view through which we see what Swift is trying to tell us about England, morality, and mankind. But he's also the only character available to support our interest in Gulliver's Travels as a narrative. Gulliver doesn't just tell us his story; he also animates it for us. I couldn’t sit through Swift's lengthy lessons of morality without the amusing liveliness of Gulliver to lighten them.
Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, Japan, and Houyhnhnm Land are all settings in Gulliver’s Travels. These settings in Gulliver's Travels explore the ideas of utopia and dystopia. A utopia is an ideal community. The Houyhnhnms represent the ideal of logical existence because they are reasonable, intelligent characters, and they represent the principal virtues of friendship and courtesy, and all the perfections that humans attempt to achieve. A utopia could also become a dystop...

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... not in the least provoked at the Sight of a Lawyer, a Pick-pocket, a Colonel. . . . This is all according to the due Course of Things: But, when I behold a Lump of Deformity, and Diseases both in Body and Mind, smitten with Pride, it immediately breaks all the Measures of my Patience; neither shall I ever be able to comprehend how such an Animal and such a Vice could tally together.” - This quote comes from the end of the story, in Part 4, Chapter 12, when Gulliver explains the struggles he has had adjusting to his own human culture. He now identifies English and European culture with the Yahoos. By accrediting a number of sins to “the due Course of Things,” Gulliver shows his new belief that humans are, as the Houyhnhnms believe, uncontrollable and dishonest at heart. Humans are nothing more than animals with only enough reason to make their corruption threatening.

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