Quest for Truth Depicted in Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Huxley's Brave New World

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.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World incorporates the political ploy of brainwashing and uses it to promote the common belief. While the term “brainwashing” was coined during the Cold War era, it still carries heavy implications and often suggests harsh techniques. Subsequently, brainwashing can be seen as ridding a person of their own ideology and replacing it with a more suitable collection of thoughts. Through techniques of mass education, thought control, and depravation of critical judgment, the World Controllers in the Brave New World are brainwashing their citizens and creating a perpetual state of dependency and confusion, serving as a warning for modern civilizations.

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.

Our forms of conditioning might not be exact but they still relate. Instead of electric shock and hypnopedia, we are conditioned by media. On page 34, the controller tells the students that “History is bunk”. This relates to our world because see people become famous out of nowhere and we begin to think that school is not necessary, our math classes and history classes are bunk. “We condition the masses to hate the country… But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports” (page 23). In our world, we are so caught up in social media and what’s going on on the internet that we no longer like to go outside. Yet, we all want to be the star athlete and go pro. Huxley warns us that government control is brainwashing and blinding. We won't ever get to experience life in full if we let the government control every move we make.

In Brave New World Aldous Huxley, creates a dystopian society which is scientifically advance in order to make life orderly, easy, and free of trouble. This society is controlled by a World State who is not question. In this world life is manufactured and everyone is created with a purpose, never having the choice of free will. Huxley use of irony and tone bewilders readers by creating a world with puritanical social norms, which lacks love, privacy and were a false sense of happiness is instituted, making life meaningless and controlled.

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

Aldous Huxley has a humanistic, deep and enlightened view of how society should be, and of what constitutes true happiness. In his novel, Brave New World, he shows his ideas in a very obscure manner. Huxley presents his ideas in a satirical fashion. This sarcastic style of writing helped Huxley show his views in a very captivating and insightful manner. The entire novel describes a dystopia in which intimate relationships, the ability to choose one's destiny, and the importance of family are strictly opposed. In Huxley's mind, however, these three principles are highly regarded as necessary for a meaningful and fulfilling existence.

Reading Brave New World written by Aldous Huxley, readers are led to a dystopia in which the World State takes control over everything including reproduction, consumption and the most important of all‐conditioning. Although Lenina and Linda are not the main characters that bring the story to its climax, they play significant roles in the story as they represent the people being affected by the World State conditioning.

“We are half ruined by conformity, but we should be wholly ruined without it”. The aforementioned quote by Charles Dudley Warner appears to parallel the views on conformity Aldous Huxley created in his novel “Brave New World”. Conformity, and with this, stability, in Huxley’s world is only possible with the excessive use of conditioning and the hyper-cloning of zygotes called “Bokanovsky’s Process”. Conditioning is not something created in “Brave New World”. Behaviorists like Ivan Pavlov and John B. Watson performed conditioning experiments on dogs and even children (in respective order). However, Huxley created a society where “people’s” lives are predetermined even before conception. This stimulates the question: “Is mindless conformity ethical?”.

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.

Having been a somewhat of an outsider in his life, physically and mentally, Aldous Huxley used what others thought as his oddities to create complex works. His large stature and creative individuality is expressed in the characters of his novel, Brave New World. In crafting such characters as Lenina, John, Linda, Bernard, and Helmholtz, not to mention the entire world he created in the text itself, Huxley incorporated some of his humanities into those of his characters. Contrastly, he removed the same humanities from the society as a whole to seem perfect. This, the essence and value of being human, is the great meaning of Brave New World. The presence and lack of human nature in the novel exemplifies the words of literary theorist Edward Said: “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” Huxley’s characters reflect the “rift” in their jarred reaction to new environments and lifestyles, as well as the remnant of individuality various characters maintain in a brave new world.

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

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 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.