Gulliver’s Travels in Classics Without All the Class

Sep 19, 2013 Carol rated it it was amazing

Shelves: jonathan-swift

I have to say that satire is, currently, not my favorite; but Jonathan Swift enjoyed it greatly. My thought was that Gulliver's Travels was a children's storybook or novelistic reading which established the book's longevity. But I am mistaken. In the book, the main character tells us things that are truly out of decorum, about the travel story which we think we are reading. Part 1, Gulliver's is among the tiny people of Lilliputian and Bleufuscu, where everything in European world is scaled down I have to say that satire is, currently, not my favorite; but Jonathan Swift enjoyed it greatly. My thought was that Gulliver's Travels was a children's storybook or novelistic reading which established the book's longevity. But I am mistaken. In the book, the main character tells us things that are truly out of decorum, about the travel story which we think we are reading. Part 1, Gulliver's is among the tiny people of Lilliputian and Bleufuscu, where everything in European world is scaled down on a ratio of one to twelve. Gulliver gives us information about this strange place, it's political life, it's interning use, and some of its customs. Gulliver is captured by the Lilliputians and led into the city, he is chained down and billeted in a disused temple (resembles England's Westminster Cathedral). And alarmingly his account then deviates into a description of his act of defecation. This passage forces the readers to recognize that Swift is ridiculing the travel story, as well as Swift is at the same time imitating and arouses the uncomfortable suspicion that readers too are under attack. Throughout the book, addresses such as 'candid,' 'curious', 'courteous', or 'gentle reader', is a reminder that Swift is subverting both the apparent form of his story and the kind of reading which invites. By the end of Part IV, Gulliver can speak out directly against the genre he has imitated. Swift's satire targets are more than one particular act of reading, it also requires the assumptions that make up the mentality of a reader -- assumptions about discourse, reason, and human nature. he is telling the repeated introduction of excrement is one of the clearest signals of Swift's subversive activity. Neither the polish of Swift's plain and simple prose style, nor it's venerable age can hide the fact that this work is often as rude and as adversarial as any modern product of political activism. Gulliver's Travels is not a novel or a story, but it belongs instead to the more difficult literary genre od the satire. It is a parody of travel, following the form and spirit of a long line of satirical works that begun in ancient times. Some satirical works established with Greek poet Lucian, Rabelais, Sir Thomas More, and Cyrano de Bergerac. And later with Roman satirists -- Horace, Juvenal, and Persuis.

Gulliver's Travels treats all the standard topics of classical satire. Like Juvenal's tenth satire, it makes fun of the vanity of the most common of human wishes: money, power, fame, long-life, learning (especially without effort), beauty, etc. like most great satires, it cannot be said to urge a particular virtuous course of life on its readers, though some simple, Christian triad of faith, hope, and charity may be implicitly recommended. One important vehicle od Swift's is his use of perspective. The fact that the changes from Part to Part is a salient and delightful feature of the work. It is a sort of conceit that usually propels a metaphysical poem. Samuel Johnson had the same impatient response to Swift's conceit as he did to metaphysical poetry."When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest. All the rest isn't the entire book, but it does cover a great deal, especially of Parts I and II and often it entails aspects of the general satire. Example: Gulliver's size in comparison to the Lilliputians is the device that generates all the talk about the difficulty of feeding and housing his enormous body. He is 12 times the Lilliputians in height, but it follows that he is twelve times their size in every dimension, so that his bulk is 12 3 or 1728 times theirs. Such enormity is gross and it is clearly meant to remind us of the grossness of the human body, a common topic in satires and sermons designed to discourse worldly pride and remind us of the importance of spirit. (example-- Gulliver takes advantage of his size to extinguish the fire in the Lilliputian palace by directing a stream of urine on the queen's quarters. Towering in corporal superiority, he fails to consider how repulsive and humiliating this might be to the sensibilities of the queen.
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