Gulliver’s Travels published October 28, 1726

Considered Swift’s masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels is the most brilliant as well as the most bitter and controversial of his satires. Written in a matter-of-fact style and with an air of sober reality, the work defeats oversimple explanations.

Is it essentially comic, or is it a misanthropic depreciation of humankind? Swift certainly seems to use the various races and societies Gulliver encounters in his travels to satirize many of the errors, follies, and frailties that human beings are prone to. The warlike, disputatious, but essentially trivial Lilliputians in the first section and the deranged impractical pedants and intellectuals in the third segment are shown as imbalanced beings lacking common sense and even decency. The Houyhnhnms, by contrast, are the epitome of reason and virtuous simplicity. However, Gulliver’s own proud identification with these horses and his subsequent disdain for his fellow humans indicates that he too has become imbalanced and that human beings are simply incapable of aspiring to the virtuous rationality that Gulliver has glimpsed.

Gulliver’s Travels, four-part satirical work by Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift, published anonymously oh October 28,1726 as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. A keystone of English literature, it is one of the books that contributed to the emergence of the novel as a literary form in English. A parody of the then popular travel narrative, Gulliver’s Travels combines adventure with savage satire, mocking English customs and the politics of the day.

s Travels is a first-person narrative that is told from the point of view of Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon and sea captain who visits remote regions of the world, and it describes four adventures. In the first one, Gulliver is the only survivor of a shipwreck, and he swims to Lilliput, where he is tied up by people who are less than 6 inches (15 cm) tall. He is then taken to the capital city and eventually released. The Lilliputians’ small size mirrors their small-mindedness.

They indulge in ridiculous customs and petty debates. Political affiliations, for example, are divided between men who wear high-heeled shoes (symbolic of the English Tories) and those who wear low ones (representing the English Whigs), and court positions are filled by those who are best at rope dancing. Gulliver is asked to help defend Lilliput against the empire of Blefuscu, with which Lilliput is at war over which end of an egg should be broken, this being a matter of religious doctrine. Gulliver captures Blefuscu’s naval fleet, thus preventing an invasion, but declines to assist the emperor of Lilliput in conquering Blefuscu. Later Gulliver extinguishes a fire in the royal palace by urinating on it. Eventually he falls out of favour and is sentenced to be blinded and starved. He flees to Blefuscu, where he finds a normal-size boat and is thus able to return to England.

SOURCE: Cambridge Univ., Britanica