Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735) is a work of fiction by Jonathan Swift that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of the "travellers' tales" literary sub-genre. Swift's masterpiece, it is his most celebrated work and one of the indisputable classics of the English language.

Analysis and Overview

Gulliver's Travels has been called a lot of things from Mennipean Satire to a children's story, from proto-Science Fiction to a forerunner of the modern novel. Possibly one of the reasons for the book's classic status is that it can be seen as many things to many people. It is even funny. Broadly the book has three themes:

Related Topics:
Mennipean Satire - Science Fiction - Novel - Funny

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• a satirical view of the state of European government
• an inquiry into whether man is inherently corrupt or whether men are corrupted
• a restatement of the older "ancients v. moderns" controversy previously addressed by Swift in the Battle of the Books.

In terms of storytelling and construction the parts follow a pattern :

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• The cause of Gulliver's misadventures becomes more malignant as time goes on - he is first shipwrecked, then abandoned or lost, then attacked by strangers then attacked by his own crew.
• Gulliver's attitude hardens as the book progresses — he is genuinely surprised by the viciousness and politicking of the Lilliputians but finds the behaviour of the Yahoos in the fourth part reflective of the behaviour of "civilised" people
• Each part is the reverse of the preceding part — Gulliver is big/small/sensible/ignorant, the countries are sophisticated/simple/scientific/natural, forms of Government are worse/better/worse/better than England's and so on
• Gulliver's view between parts contrasts with the other "matching" part — Gulliver sees the tiny Lilliputians as being vicious and unscrupulous and then the king of Brobdningnag sees Europe in exactly the same light and so on
• No form of government is ideal — the simplistic Brobingnagians enjoy public executions and have streets infested with beggars, the honest and upright Houyhnhnms who have no word for lying are happy to suppress the true nature of Gulliver as a Yahoo and equally unconcerned about his reaction to being expelled
• Specific individuals may be good even where the race is bad — Gulliver finds a friend in all his travels and, despite Gulliver's rejection and horror of all Yahoos, is treated very well by the Portuguese captain who returns him to England at the novel's end.

Of equal interest is the character of Gulliver himself — he progresses from a cheery optimist at the start of the first part to the pompous misanthrope of the book's conclusion and we may well have to filter our understanding of the work if we are to believe the final misanthrope wrote the whole work. In this sense GT is a very modern and complex novel. There are subtle shifts throughout the book, such as when Gulliver begins to see all humans, not just those in Houyhnhnm-land, as Yahoos.

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Despite the depth and subtlety of the book, it is often derided as a children's story because of the popularity of the Lilliput section (frequently bowdlerised) as a book for children. It is still possible to buy books entitled Gulliver's Travels which contain only parts of the Lilliput part.

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