Examples Of Swift As A Misanthrope

     Jonathan Swift is one of the best known satirists in the history of literature. When one reads his works, especially something like Gulliver’s Travels, it is easy for one to spot the misanthropic themes, which emerge within his characterization. Lamuel Gulliver is an excellent protagonist: a keen observer, and a good representative of his native England, but one who loses faith in mankind as his story progresses. He ends up in remote areas of the world all by accidents in his voyages. In each trip, he is shipwrecked and mysteriously arrives to lands never before seen by men. This forms an interesting rhythm in the novel: as Gulliver is given more and more responsibility, he tends to be less

Swift was a neoclassical writer who wrote to enlighten people. He wanted people to look at the world that exits beyond them selves and discover virtue. Through his work Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift demonstrates to the reader the importance of virtue. I this story the main character am Gulliver; a world traveler who takes a journey to different lands. Each place that Gulliver lands has different ideals that are the foundation of their society. Their views on life are completely new to Gulliver.

Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726, by Jonathan Swift, is a travel narrative about Lemuel Gulliver. Europe, around the time Swift published his novel, was dominated with ideas of Enlightenment which privileged rational thought and reason. Man during this time believed to be superior to all creatures, based on his ability to reason. Gulliver’s Travels satirically relates bodily functions and physical attributes to social issues as well as the Enlightenment Theory. Through the voyages of Gulliver, Swift breaks down the exalted notions which were associated with the age of the Enlightenment. Swift also uses graphic representations of the body and its functions, to reveal to the reader that greatness is

As for the pathos he uses an odd cluster of words that attract your attention that makes you feel emotion towards these poor family you don’t even know. “’ All their time in strolling to beg substances for their helpless infants:” (Swift 1) and “Voluntary abortions, and that horrid practice of women murdering their bastard children...” (Swift 2). The words in this such as horrid, bastard, helpless, beg stir up emotion. Another pathos that Swift uses is the people or poor people the proposal refers to them as, is he dehumanizes them to the position of an animal.

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.

Gulliver’s Travel’s is divided into four parts, each part retelling one of Gulliver’s voyages and each also addressing an aspect of Swift’s discontentment. The satire that Swift deploys is present in Gulliver’s perceptions.

Swift considers human are not only evil in nature but keep corrupting. The European moralists say: “the nature is degenerated in these latter declining ages of the world, and could now produce only small abortive births in comparison of those ancient times” (Swift 187) In Glubbdubdrib, people can make ancients appears with magic, Gulliver makes conversation with ancients, and finds “As every person called up made exactly the same appearance he had done in the world, it gave me melancholy reflections to observe how much the race of mankind was degenerated among us, within those hundred years past”, “how all these pure native virtues were prostituded for a piece of money by their grandchildren” (Swift 271) Gulliver is thrown into deep melancholy as he discover the degeneration of human nature. Not only the ancient virtues are lost, but also man’s physical condition is becoming worse and worse as Swift points out in Gulliver’s fourth voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms where his satire reaches its pinnacle: “I seemed to fail in strength and agility”, “He said I differed indeed from other Yahoos, being much more cleanly, and not altogether so deformed, but in point of real advantage he thought I differed for the worse.” (Swift 322) human’s disposition is like Yahoos’ which is violent and primitive, but human’s

Ironically, Gulliver insists to refuse his status of yahoo, the procedure of Gulliver’s acceptation to the status of yahoo is under a depressed atmosphere. When Gulliver backs home, he is still struggling to be a rational creature in his mind which is Houyhnhnm or to be a corrupted creature which is yahoo. Swift’s sharp criticism makes the novel isn’t as fun as ‘Candide’. However, it makes reader think over the purpose of his criticism.

The last part of the book has Gulliver facing an extreme different point of view that changes Gulliver into a mental state to which he may not recover. He encounter to cultures, the Houyhnhums and the Yahoos. The Houyhnhums are very intelligent horses that live like ordinary humans, and the Yahoos are humans that act like dumb monkeys that are only useful for manual labor, and have almost no intellect. To Gulliver he is not like the Yahoos but to the Houyhnhums people he looks like them but he is smarter. The whole idea of Gulliver looking like a Yahoo starts to roll around in Gulliver’s head and he starts to lose his mind. He changes his mind about what he looks like and believes that he must never congregate with people that look like them, for example, human beings from England and everywhere

The Lilliputians are supposed to symbolize the Whigs, and Swift thinks of them as stupid and power-hungry. He demonstrates this when they search Gulliver for weapons. In Swift’s time the Whigs searched the Tories for evidence of their connections with England. He also makes fun of the thinking at the time; the Lilliputians were discriminated against whether they wore either high heels or low heels, and the ones that tried to remain neutral worse one high heel and one low heel. At the end of the book Swift demonstrates his thought on humans, when all the humans were savage and stupid, while the animals were brilliant. I believe that Swift demonstrates all his points very well. The reader is transported to the story, yet unlike most books, Swift doesn’t tell the reader exactly what to think, he insinuates it but lets the reader come to his own conclusions.

Jonathan Swift's story, Gulliver's Travels, is a very clever story. It recounts the fictitious journey of a fictitious man named Lemuel Gulliver, and his travels to the fantasy lands of Lilliput, Brobdinag, Laputa, and Houyhnhmn land. When one first reads his accounts in each of these lands, one may believe that they are reading humorous accounts of fairy-tale-like lands that are intended to amuse children. When one reads this story in the light of it being a satire, the stories are still humorous, but one realizes that Swift was making a public statement about the affairs of England and of the human race as a whole.

The term scatological means to have an interest or preoccupation with the obscene. In his book, Gulliver’s Travels, it is hard to miss the various references that its author, Johnathan Swift, makes concerning bodily functions. Yet, this is more than the bawdy, juvenile toilet humor one would encounter in a cheeky T.V. show but has a literary purpose. Scatology is used to define the literary trope of the grotesque body. Through the realist perspective Swift employs scatology as a means of satire. This invokes Swift’s contemporary politics. He uses it to draw attention to Gulliver’s humanity, balancing out the strangeness of the lands Gulliver visits. Realism in literature, “refers generally to any artistic or literary portrayal of life in a faithful, accurate manner, unclouded by false ideals, literary conventions, or misplaced aesthetic glorification and beautification of the world. It is a theory or tendency in writing to depict events in human life in a matter-of-fact, straightforward manner. It is an attempt to reflect life as it actually is.” Swift uses the daily grotesque and bodily functions to both connect his audience and provoke disgust in them. By employing a blasé attitude when using this device, Swift manages to create a novel that has both realist aesthetic and the fantastical grotesque. He accomplishes this because the grotesque is simply an exaggeration of reality. Swift also creates the character of Gulliver, a realist character

By the end of the book, it is clear to Gulliver that the people of England are exactly like the yahoos. He is disgusted by this idea and when he returns home, he can hardly be around his family. He also despises the thought that he brought more humans into the world. Gulliver had so much pride in who he thought he was that when he realizes he is completely wrong, he has a strong desire to become more like the horses because he views them as the ideal being. Gulliver goes from the idea that England could do nothing wrong to the idea that the horses could do nothing wrong. Jonathan Swift is criticizing human pride through the way Gulliver’s pride causes him to be blind to reality.

A. In 1710, Swift, disgusted with their alliance with the Dissenters, withdrew from the Whigs, aligned himself with the Tories, and took up the position of editor of the Tory newspaper The Examiner (Cody). “But Swift did not thereby renounce his essentially Whiggish convictions regarding the nature of government. The old Tory theory of the divine right of kings had no claim upon him. The ultimate power, he insisted, derived from the people as a whole and, in the English constitution, had come to be exercised jointly by king, lords, and commons” (Quintana). Through his many articles and pamphlets that were written in defense of Tory policies, Swift became one of the most effective spokespersons of any British administration. With the death of Queen Anne in August 1714 and the accession of George I, the Tories were a ruined party, and Swift’s career in England was at an end. When Swift was writing Gulliver’s

The novel, Gulliver’s Travels, is just that, a novel about the main character, Gulliver who goes on many journeys. The part of this book that brings out the reader’s interest is Gulliver’s character and the ways his character changes as the story progresses. He begins as a naïve Englishman and by the end of the book he has a strong hatred for the human race. Gulliver shows that his adventures have taught him that a simple life, one without the complexities and weaknesses of human society, may be best, but the simple life he longed for should not have been the route he took.