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Gulliver's Travels Essay

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Gulliver’s Travels: British Society and American Society
“Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.” In Jonathan Swift’s fictional novel, Gulliver’s Travels, Lemuel Gulliver, is the narrator and protagonist who goes on four adventurous voyages. He is a practical-minded Englishman trained as a surgeon who takes to the seas when his business fails. The details in his style of narration makes it clear that he is bright or intelligent, and well educated, but his insights are naïve and gullible. Throughout his journeys, Gulliver is a serious first-person narrative that hardly shows any signs of self-reflection or deep emotional response. Certainly, sometimes his obsession with the facts of navigation, becomes difficult to comprehend, as his fictional editor, Richard Sympson, makes it clear when he explains having had to cut out nearly half of Gulliver’s repetition. In Gulliver's Travels, Swift introduces many places that serve as a looking glass …show more content…

Gulliver's various conflicts in the lands he visits allow Swift to discuss a number of problems.
“[T]hey go on Shore to rob and plunder; they see an harmless People, are entertained with Kindness, they give the Country a new Name, they take formal Possession of it for the King, they set up a rotten Plank or a Stone for a Memorial, they murder two or three Dozen of the Natives, bring away a Couple more by Force for a Sample, return home, and get their Pardon. Here commences a New Dominion acquired with a Title by Divine Right . . . the Earth reeking with the Blood of its Inhabitants” (Swift part 4 chapter 12).
Gulliver returns home to England after his stay among the Houyhnhnms, tries to apologize for what he sees as the only fault he committed while on his journeys: failing to claim the lands he visited in the name of England. At first, he justifies the way English society and the way England is

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