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Gullivers Travels Essay

Decent Essays

SATIRE OF GULLIVER’S TRAVELS

Jonathan Swift’s satirical prose, Gulliver’s Travels, is the subject of a wide variety of literary critique and social interpretation. Although many readers, at first glance, take this tale to be simply a fantastic narrative of a common man and his encounters with unusual locations and people through several journeys, further inspection reveals Swift’s true purpose of creativity--satire. Using the contemporary style of the Travel
Narrative, Swift is able to insert his own personal criticisms of modern life into the experience of Gulliver. Swift focuses entirely on satirizing humanity in Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels.
Gulliver, representing a common …show more content…

His opinion of the Yahoos contrasts with his opinion of the Houyhnhnms.
The Houyhnhnms think Gulliver is another Yahoo capable of outstanding intellect, but Gulliver is offended that they want to classify him as a Yahoo. “I expressed my Uneasiness at his giving me so often the
Appellation of Yahoo, an odious Animal, for which I so utter an Hatred and Contempt” (IV, 205). Gulliver is able to discard his preconceived notion of man as superior being for a more cynical outlook after interacting with the inhabitants of Houyhnhnmland. Gulliver’s transition from a “lover of mankind” to misanthropy comes as a result of a realization that man is not as he considers himself, but rather more
“compatible, indeed, only with a formula, infinitely more humiliating to human pride, which pushes man nearly if not quite over to the opposite pole of the animal world”(IV, 403).
Gulliver sees the Yahoos not as beasts far-removed from the
European man, but rather that the European man is merely a “more civilized variety of Yahoo”(IV, 244) who is subject to an “irrational disposition which motivates his habitual behavior”(IV, 404). The Yahoo brutes that inhabit Houyhnhnmland are a despicable species that have the physical appearance of humans. Though their behavior seems to be decadent and irrational, Swift shows that most of their

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