Summary Of The Story Of Gulliver's Trip To The Houyhnthhnm?

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Based on the account of Gulliver’s visit to the foreign land of the Houyhnhnms, it was quite apparent that his experience consisted of shock and adaptation. From the moment of arrival, he was put into a state of emergency. In his time on the island, Gulliver was introduced to many alien ideas and creatures. In the time he was on the island, he both learned of and tried to shorten the chasm of difference between humans and Houyhnhnms. The greatest lesson he learned included his epiphany with the Yahoos. With this realization, his life was never the same as his thinking process has been changed like never before. The Houyhnhnm culture proposed the idea of a new way of life to Gulliver. Through the Yahoo culture, he was convinced of the preposterous …show more content…

This conclusion was not an original idea, but was something that he had learned from the Houyhnhnms. That idea was the inferiority and the disgust of the Yahoos. Admittedly, Gulliver was similar to the Yahoos, but that problem was quickly solved. Actually, one of the first things that he and the Houyhnhnms learned was that Gulliver both resembled and vastly differed from the Yahoos. Gulliver was hairless and clothed when compared to his savage counterparts [Swift, 245]. Additionally, Gulliver seemed more intelligent than the Yahoos with an awareness of situation. The Yahoos, in contrast, were illiterate with no established form of communication [Swift, 241]. The Houyhnhnms realized that the two were different when this hairless Yahoo did not eat raw flesh when presented with it [Swift, 245]. From that point on, the native society took in Gulliver and began to cultivate his reasoning. Once Gulliver had set himself apart from the Yahoos, he quickly began to criticize them. After spending enough time with the Houyhnhnms and observing the Yahoos for himself, Gulliver believed that they really were as disgusting as the Houyhnhnms thought. Soon, he detested the Yahoos just as the Houyhnhnms did. He knew that he was superior to the Yahoos in various ways. However his ignorance was short lived. This was until he was bathing in the river and a female Yahoo in the river attempted to seduce him (272). This moved him to the conclusion, “the females had a natural propensity to me as one of their own species.”( 272) Such a disgusting realization, that he may have some correlation to these filthy animals, changed his life. It was not the sheer repulsion of the Yahoos but their comparability to humans. The Houyhnhnms also figured this as well. They came to the conclusion that the humans that Gulliver described were not very far from

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