Gulliver’s Travels-Jonathan Swift

Heenaba ZalaDept. of English

M. K. Bhavnagar University

Characters:

• Gulliver- the protagonist and the narrator of the story. The novel is about his journey, his exposure to different worlds.

• The Emperor of Liliput• The farmer- Gulliver’s master in Brobdingnag• Glumdalclitch- the farmer’s daughter• The Queen and the King of Brobdingnag• Lord Munodi- Lord of Lagado, Laputa island• Yahoos- they represent savage human society• Houyhnhnms- they represent disciplined, cultured

society• Gulliver’s Houyhnhnms master

• Don Pedro de Mendez• Mary Burton Gulliver• Richard Sympson• James Bates • Abraham Pannell• William Prichard • Flimnap • Reldresal• Skyresh Bolgolam• Tramecksan• Slamecksan

Gulliver’s Travel as a satire:

• Multi-layered text• Swift’s satire is inspired by his hatred of mankind.• His ridiculous jokes appear very serious.• The novel is the imagination of Swift, a fully fictional

world, but the real intent is different. • The society seems unreal with it has a magic mirror.• The novel can be read as the most powerful attack

ever made against man's wickedness and stupidity.

• Gulliver's voyage to Lilliput, in the first part of the book, takes us to the land of pygmies, a land that bears a striking resemblance to England. Lilliput is a miniature empire with a little monarch who entitled himself as "delight and terror of the universe". Swift describes the life and customs of the Lilliputian court, highly remindful of the picture he had seen in London.

• The major difference is the size. It emphasizes physical power.

• Gulliver learns about the rope-dancing skill and the selection of government officials. The would-be officers jump from through the hoops to get the position in the king’s court. This is arbitrary and ridiculous.

• Gulliver is tied up. This shows futile attempts of Lilliputians. They are unaware of their insignificance. They are in illusion that they have controlled Gulliver. With this Swift shows humanity’s pretentions to power and significance, importance. Gulliver’s enjoyment being a big fish in small pond.

• Lilliputians try to bring Gulliver to their heel is ridiculous because Gulliver can kill them simply by walking.

• A Lilliputian teaches Gulliver their language. Here Swift is mocking at humanity’s belief in its own importance. Gulliver tries to communicate in all the languages which he knows.

• Gulliver’s belongings are taken away by the Lilliputians and he is forced to sign a document. In the document each word emphasizes Gulliver’s power.

• All is meaningless and contradictory.• The kingdom is divided into two factions, Tramecksan

and Slamecksan. The people are distinguished by the heights of their heels. The emperor belongs to the low heels. The fear of Blefuscu. Reldresal says that Blefuscu is the Other Great Empire of the Universe.

• Lilliputians don’t believe in the existence of other world, nation, human race. So they think that Gulliver’s birth is unnatural, he is dropped from the moon or the stars.

• Gulliver is informed about the reason of the war. It was about the breaking en egg.

• Lilliputains argued, “That all true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end,” here the convenient end could be interpreted as the small end. People choose death rather than to surrender. Gulliver catches the ships at Blefuscu port. The war ends.

• It may sound silly for the readers but Gulliver’s reaction is very serious. Because he relates the conflict with the European history.

• The High-heels and The Low-heels, to parties correspond to the Whigs and Tories of English politics.

• Lilliput and Blefuscu represent England and France. • The conflict between Big-Endians and Little-Endians,

the Catholics and Protestants.• Fire in the queen’s room and Gulliver’s profane

action to save lives. This also shows Gulliver’s physical strength. It asserts the fact that Gulliver can control the Lilliputians. The queen represents Queen Anne.

• Gulliver learns about customs of the Lilliputians. Children are raised by the kingdom not by individual parents. The laborers’ children stay at home because they are suppose to work in a farm.

• The Liliputians don’t have other plans. Whenever they discuss the alternatives the discussion ends in violent conflict. For them theirs is the only existing world. They are educated but like British people they also believe in superstitions.

A Voyage to Brobdingnag:

• Gulliver in reverse situation• Gulliver enslaved by the farmer. Master-slave

relationship• The god like Gulliver has little importance left before

the giants• Gulliver’s fight with rats are adventures for him. • The king sands three great scholars to examine

Gulliver. They examined Gulliver’s shape and said that he could not be produced according to the regular Laws of Nature. Then they observed his teeth and said that he was a carnivorous animal. One of them said that he might be an Embrio or aborative Birth.

• Gulliver is forced to dance before public. Like Europeans the brobdingnagians are happy to use power.

• The king makes fun of Gulliver’s culture. The England seems insignificant to the king.

• Gulliver is used as a plaything. With a microscopic view, Gulliver finds the culture imperfect. The personal importance of an individual is threatened. The national and individual identity is at risk.

• Gulliver’s position in England, in Lilliput and now in Brobdingnag, he tries to maintain the illusion of his importance.

• Gulliver challenges the position of dwarf in the court.

• The imperfection is not of an organization or a law. The culture is imperfect. When Gulliver tries to tell the king about the secret of gunpowder, the king immediately refuses. For Gulliver gunpowder is an achievement but for the king it has no importance.

• High moral sense in Brobdingnagians• In Brobdingnag the king tries to minimize the vices

but they are not. The farmer, the dwarf are such examples.

• In Europe also they live with the illusion that no vices exist in their society.

• Gulliver speaks in English but the giants laugh at him.

A Voyage to Laputa:

• Attacked by the pirates. Christian v/s heathen• Deformed human beings, deformed culture.• The common problem Gulliver faces is of language.• The power is shown by their use of technology.• Gulliver’s dislike.• The floating island represents the distance between

the government and the people.• The king’s concern for the people below but he never

comes below to meet people.

• Servants with flappers standing beside their master. Thinkers and scientists are busy in their day dreams.

• The society seems nonhuman. The life here seems abstract and absurd.

• Futile attempts of educated people. They are so called educated. It is not for the betterment of the society.

• Women should be taxed according to their beauty and their skill at dressing.

The land of Houyhnhnms:

• Transformation in Gulliver• Gulliver no longer cares for human society.• He quickly learns the language of houyhnhnms.• Gulliver tells them about his country where human

beings rule and horses are trained to work for them. Houyhnhnms are not ready to believe Gulliver.

• Here animals are rational and cultured.• The shocking part of this part is the revelation of

yahoos’ identity as human beings.

• Gulliver talks about war and gives reason for that.• Gulliver also informs them about law and order of his

nation.• Europeans described as yahoos. Their life style is

different but their nature is the same.• Greed and selfishness in human nature• Houyhnhnms have life of community. They don’t live

personal life.• Gulliver thinks of his people as European yahoos and

he prefers to live with barbarians than with his own people.

• Swift is challenging the traditional idea that humans are rational animals.

Social hierarchy:

• Gulliver- tormented by the social hierarchy.• Gulliver’s voice is controlled. Swift makes him

unreliable and untrustworthy while inserting him into a variety of social situations with ever-changing conventions.

• Gulliver tries to improve his position in hierarchy and is denied to do so.

• Gulliver is a self-conscious narrator. His position is limited.

• Swift goes beyond the languages those of class, gender and ethnicity by creating different languages and social systems and bringing his author character into them.

• For a comic effect there should be a difference, a distance between the true author and a character author.

• When Gulliver finds himself in different culture takes everything seriously and Swift is very serious at such points.

• Critics tried to differentiate Swift’s life and his writings. Said claims “Swift as intellectual” but “a traditional intellectual”. He is not well-born. He is an outsider. Swift’s feelings of an anti-eNGLISH

• Swift, here, does not try to change the system. He attempt to find out flaws. Swift presents the existing society with full of social hierarchy and fundamental feeling of insecurity in such society.

• Gulliver and his odd travels are the result of Swift’s conflicted conscious. Gulliver is continuously trying to better his position in different society.

• Gulliver- an English man belongs to middle class. • “My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire; I was

the third of five sons. He sent me to Emanuel College in Cambridge . . . where I resided for three years, and applied myself close to my studies; but the charge of maintaining me (although I had a scanty allowance) was too great for a narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr. James Bates, an eminent surgeon in London” (Swift 49).

• Gulliver had to end up his education in a society where education was a key to get a position.

• Gulliver comes from a society which is closed off to him by the lack of money.

• Gulliver’s decision to leave home for sea voyages indicates that he wanted to improve his position financially.

• Gulliver-neither high nor low, and is prevented from attaining his goal.

• Powerless Gulliver is allowed to survive by the power given by the king.

Swift’s Verisimilitude

• The novel is a work of fantasy.• Verisimilitude is very similar to truth.• The story is told in a first person singular with

an eyewitness account. • Readers are directly addressed.• The background is of the real world• Imaginary characters and places with some

real world ‘touch’• Juxtaposition of real and unreal world

• The reader may please to observe, that, in the last article of the recovery of my liberty, the emperor stipulates to allow me a quantity of meat and drink sufficient for the support of 1724 Lilliputians. Some time after, asking a friend at court how they came to fix on that determinate number, he told me that his majesty's mathematicians, having taken the height of my body by the help of a quadrant, and finding it to exceed theirs in the proportion of twelve to one, they concluded from the similarity of their bodies, that mine must contain at least 1724 of theirs, and consequently would require as much food as was necessary to support that number of Lilliputians.

• By which the reader may conceive an idea of the ingenuity of that people, as well as the prudent and exact economy of so great a prince.

• But at the same time the reader can hardly conceive my astonishment, to behold an island in the air, inhabited by men, who were able (as it should seem) to raise or sink, or put it into progressive motion, as they pleased.

• The framework of the novel: a sense of realism and verisimilitude.

• Fantastic nature of the tales and ironic layers of The Travels.

• Tuveson points out “a constant shuttling back and forth between real and unreal, normal and absurd...”

• Swift distinguishes between how man behaves and how he thinks about the behavior.

• Pride: deceives man. Man thinks about himself as rational and virtuous.

• voyages 1 and 2 focus on criticism of various aspects of English society at the time, and man within this society, while voyages 3 and 4 are more preoccupied with human nature.

• Houyhnhnms – more humanity than humans• Menippean satire is a term employed broadly

to refer to prose satires that are complex in nature, combining many different targets of ridicule into a fragmented satiric narrative. The form is named after the Greek cynic Menippus

• "The novelist sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect,…“.

• Jonathan Swift : A Misanthrope or Hater of Mankind in The Gulliver’s Travels

• “I hate and detest that animal called man…”• ‘human creature not more than six inches

high’- Swift’s this presentation of an impossible physical smallness of the human race is desired to show the possible mental smallness.

• Common human tendency to keep power by unfair means is presented in Book- 2.

• The king of Brobdingnags: “I can not but conclude the bulk of your natives, to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

• The Houyhnhnms are ‘endued with a proportionable degree of reason’ and ‘orderly and rational, acute and judicious’ . The Houyhnhnms are ‘the Perfection of Nature’ while “the yahoos … were observed to be the most unteachable of all brutes”

• “Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels describes man as ‘a lump of deformity and disease both in body and mind, smitten with pride’.”

• Swift has so much hatred towards mankind that he makes Gulliver tell- “I expressed my uneasiness at his giving me so often the appellation of Yahoo, an odious animal, for which a had so utter an hatred.”

• ‘the cursed race of Yahoo’• “When I behold a lump of deformity and

disease both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience.”

• Earl of Orrey, Swift’s earliest biographer, who says,

• “no man [was] better acquainted [than Swift] with human nature, both in the highest’ and in the lowest scenes of life.”

• Gulliver’s inability to resist a societal perspectivism is his true weakness.

• No desire to be different• Gender discrimination• No female protagonist• Gulliver’s dislike of the Brobdingnag women

and his wife • ‘Female’ metaphorically used for the nation• Dislike of female is dislike of the nation.