Analysis Of Gulliver 's Travels By Jonathan Swift

Yet due to his pride for his native England, in the country of the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver is gradually driven mad by his realization that he can never hope to achieve the state of existence of the supremely rational, noble Houyhnhnms. Even though the Houyhnhnms consider Gulliver to be noble, Gulliver is constantly offended when he sees a disturbing resemblance between himself and the barbaric Yahoos. He falls to the same sin of pride that he condemned in the others in previous voyages. He is disgusted that the members of his own human race are living a filthy lifestyle such as the animals of England, and this makes him eager to return to home, where he thinks things are normal. Therefore, a rat ready to enter its hole represents Gulliver forced to return to England because of his fear that he will eventually turn barbaric.

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift is a story about a man named Gulliver who travels to many different islands in his quest to get home. His first encounter is with the Lilliputians on their island of Lilliput. The Lilliputians seemed rational and reasonable at first, but in reality they are not rational at all. They are revealed to be irrational because they have a corrupt court, wierd laws, and blatant discrimination.

Swift’s intentions are shown to us through some complex ways, like his writing style. Swift tries to throw the readers off track to make them pay more attention to what he is trying to say. Also in some of his comments he does mean what he writes, therefore it is up to the readers to try and figure out what he means and what he does not. Swift also shows his intentions through his choice of words. Swift talks about how a man would pay ten shillings for a human, child, carcass, to eat.

Gulliver first comes across the Houyhnnms, or horse like creatures, which run their society with reason. They are so good at what they do that they have no need for human words such as disease and war, because they simply do not exist in the land of the Houyhnnms. However, when Gulliver ventures to the other side of the island he encounters the Yahoo’s. These creature look and act exactly like humans, but Gulliver finds them utterly repulsive because of their obvious and numerous flaws. The Yahoos are careless, rude, unappreciative, not resourceful, and non-efficient. Gulliver is puzzled by the fact that their society functions at all. He is disgusted by their behavior, “neither shall I ever be able to comprehend how such an Animal and such a Vice could tally together” (Swift 225). It is then when Gulliver becomes so disgusted that he no longer wants to venture on, he wants quickly finds a way home and stay there. However, when he get homes it gives him time to think and reflect on his previous

He uses the Laputans, Houyhnhnms, Yahoos, and Gulliver to compare the array of intelligence. According to Swift, “…although they [Laputan woman] live here in the greatest plenty and magnificence…and take the diversions of the metropolis, which they are not allowed to do without a particular licence from the king…” In other words, Swift believes Gulliver’s size symbolizes a vast range of knowledge. Swift reveals the Laputan’s knowledge, which is not made socially useful. Of course, many will probably disagree with this assertion that Swift satirizes the knowledge of the Laputans to the knowledge of the Englishmen at the time, but he acknowledges the Englishmen’s use of knowledge negatively. In addition, Swift states, “When I [Gulliver] happened to behold the reflection of my own form in a lake or a fountain, I turned away my face in horror and detestation of myself, and could better endure the sight of a common Yahoo, than of my own person.” Swift believes that the Houyhnhnms, the horse race, show their intellectual size versus the Yahoo’s intellectual size. Swift uses the horses and Yahoos to show the misplaced intellectual sizes. Of course, many will disagree with this assertion that the Houyhnhnms shows a “utopia.” While it is true that Swift may use the intellectual sizes for a different purpose, it does not necessarily follow that Swift doesn’t use the Houyhnhnms, Yahoos, and Gulliver to show the

Gulliver’s typical Anglocentric Enlightenment views are best exemplified in Chapter 1 of Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels. The long paragraph, in which he describes his encounter with the Yahoos as well as the circumstances leading up to it, illustrates the climax of his Anglocentric views, after which his English pride begins to gradually degenerate and his desire to emulate the Houyhnyms arises. His English pride in this paragraph is demonstrated by his resolution to trade his life with the local “Savages” using “Toys” as his only means, his judgment of the Yahoo’s lack of comprehensive language ability, and his ever-present disgust for bodily functions.

“Vision is the art of seeing what is impossible to others” (Swift). This quote by author and satirist Jonathan Swift explains that a person can see beyond something that others don’t see if you put your mind to it. Jonathan Swift did exactly that when creating his famous novel, Gulliver’s Travels. Swift made this novel because he loved writing satire as well as making fun of politicians. In the eighteenth century, he was an Irish clergyman who opposed the British Parliament’s ideas and despised their increasing power over the common people. The idea of Gulliver’s Travels came about and Swift wanted to show the English people that their government was becoming overpowering and corrupt. Gulliver’s Travels is an adventurous story of a man named Lemuel Gulliver and how he sails from England on crazy journeys, encountering various people from Lilliputians to Yahoos. Throughout his novel, Swift created a puzzle for his readers to put together. As Gulliver meets all of these characters and describes what he finds, the reader identifies that Swift has a unique outlook on humans in his society. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift uses three elements including satire, utopian or dystopian societies, and irony and immortality to portray the different types of humans.

Swift first creates a rift between the complexities of the reader, having the yahoos as the lowest common denominator in human nature. At the other end of the spectrum the Houyhnhnms can be seen as virtue beings without the conflicts and emotional obstacles that plague men. It is told that these Houyhnhnms show no kinship, saying they would not value the life of one Houyhnhnm over that of their own children. This is in complete contrast to the yahoos who are described as the very vicious instinct of man, being referred to descriptively in a number of ways as dung. Gulliver can then be determined as the middle of this spectrum. During his examination of the Houyhnhnms Gulliver wrongfully directs morality upon them, where the Houyhnhnms represent the enlightenment of man and Gulliver that of the colonial expansion. The importance of the horse resemblance is that horses are not conflicted with such things as pride, predujuce, power, and greed. The fact the Gulliver tries to convert these creatures as his own countrymen mocks at the fact that even though this race is pure and unbias, Gulliver’s support in colonialism amplifies

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

Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels takes place in four parts, each of which describe Gulliver’s adventures with fantastical species of foreign nations. The search for Swift’s meaning has been a controversial one; the novel has been interpreted along a wide spectrum ranging from children’s story to a satire of human nature. The greatest debate lies within the realm of satire, and Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels, “A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms,” is just one area in which critics argue for a variety of satirical meanings. Critics traditionally argue for the “hard” interpretation which posits the strictly rational nature of the

Gulliver’s Travels exposes the interdependency between both human and animalistic behaviors. In these travels, the word “human” does not necessarily belong to a certain species, but is rather a characteristic of reason based on the social norms of a particular society. It also claims that animals lack reason and therefore are subdued by those with reason. Since Gulliver finds that humans are the only animals capable of reason, he sees humanity in the Houyhnhnms, who are completely governed by reason, "as these noble Houyhnhnms are endowed by Nature with a general disposition to all virtues, and have no conceptions or ideas of what is evil in a rational creature, so their grand maxim is, to cultivate Reason, and to be wholly governed by

Jonathan Swift, well-known for his stark works of satire, uses his novel Gulliver’s Travels to mock his society and culture and in doing so, he addresses the flaws in man-kind as a whole. He always tried to give his readers a different perspective on current political and social issues through the pages and chapters of his books. The people who weren’t appalled by his views happened to appreciate his plain way of speaking on actively-discussed topics. While his writing had been relatively eminent during his time and to the present, information about his life is scarce (Williams all pages).

The definition of a utopia is an imagined place or state in which everything is perfect. In book four of Gulliver’s travels Gulliver discovers a group of people called the Houyhnhnms and the group displays qualities of a possible utopia. The Houyhnhnms are very rational in their thinking, and try their best to stay away from entertainment and vanity. However the Houyhnhnms could not be considered creators of a utopia because they emphasized unrealistic rules and because of their treatment of the Yahoo people within their society. Instead it is the Lilliputians people who display the most signs of a potential utopia in Gulliver’s Travels.

In the last part of the novel Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift, a dichotomy is established which crtiticizes two extreme ideas of man. The Houynhnms, a race of horses, are meant to symbolize man as a supremely rational being and the Yahoos, a primitive, vulgar version of humans, are made to symbolize man as an animal. The narrator Gulliver is a sort of reference point between the two, since in physical appearance he seems to be a Yahoo, but his ability to reason enables him to relate well to the Houynhnms. Readers have interrpreted the rational horses in a number of different ways. Some feel that the Houynhnms are the ideal to which humans should strive to attain. Others feel that the

Aldous Huxley once said, “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception” (The Personal Path to Virtue 20). Perception is present in every aspect of society, for humans decipher receptive actions into comprehensible and consolidated views of the Earth around them. From art, to music, and even to literature, everyone has his or her own perception, one that can change and develop dependent upon everyone’s own vision. In the novel, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, the reader will find their perception of the themes and the characters in the book drastically different in the beginning of the story than at the end. When one first lays their hands on a copy of Gulliver’s Travels, the ideas and themes they would believe to be most obvious and important would include adventure, discovery and the development of civilization. They would simply formulate these ideas from the title and cover of the novel. However, as one reads the story and divulges into the deeper meaning of Gulliver and his travels, he or she will find that the limits of human understanding and the individual comparisons of nature versus society are much more present in the novel than are adventure and discovery. Change is the underlining focus of this story. From the themes to the actions of the characters and even to the motifs of the story, many facets of the story change from the first to the last page due to the overwhelming significance of adventures that