Quest for Truth Depicted in Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Huxley's Brave New World

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The search for the truth may take a lifetime, while for others it may take a year. It all depends on the person and how eager he acts to seek out the truth. The truth within every human being describes an individual’s thoughts that we hold sacred, that make us unique. The following expression “the truth will set you free”, has swept across the nation, through movies and other types of media entertainment. With the knowledge of truth comes great power which houses both good and evil thoughts. If used for evil, it can imprison a person, while for good it can release a man from prison. In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, both authors use their main characters, John and Gulliver, to find the hidden truth within each world. Although they tell different stories, they both intertwine a common theme: trying to find the truth that hides deep within society. Since the truth hides from plain sight in both books, it must motivate some to find it.

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...

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...truth however, they would probably revolt against conditioning and all hatchery factories. I believe John gets his point across even if he kills himself in the process. This can compare to that of Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels, who finds the truth behind mankind and how they live a corrupt life with a twisted government. Although he learns this from a race of horses, Gulliver truly believes in it making him avoid any human contact when he makes it back home. Instead he spends most of his time with two horses he buys. “My horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four hours every day. They are strangers to bridle or saddle; they live in great amity with me, a friendship to each other" (304). Whether they know it or not, Gulliver and John both dramatically question mankind’s existence and find what they believe to be the truth.

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