GULLIVER’S TRAVELS
By Jonathan Swift
Genre: Satire
Summary
Original Theme
Movie .vs. Book
Significant Quote
Theme Analysis
Gulliver’s Travels describes the story of Lemuel Gulliver, a practical-minded Englishman trained as a surgeon who takes to the seas when his business fails in a first-person narrative that rarely shows any signs of self-reflection or deep emotional response. Gulliver narrates the four remarkable journeys he takes. Among them, one is to the Land of Lilliput, where six-inch high inhabitants dispute over trivial. Gulliver’s adventure in Lilliput begins when he wakes after his shipwreck to find himself trapped by tiny ropes and commanded by little humans on land. The second journey to Brobdingnag, a land of Giants where Gulliver seems as small as the Lilliputians were to him. Gulliver is afraid, but his keepers are surprisingly gentle. Gulliver's third journey is to Laputa which neighbors Luggnagg and Glubdugdribb. In a visit to the island of Glubdugdribb, Gulliver is able to call up the dead and discovers the deceptions of history. His last journey is to the land of the Houyhnhnms, who are horses endowed with reason. Their rational, clean, and simple society is contrasted with the filthiness and brutality of the Yahoos, beasts in human shape.
Swift uses each journey to ridicule some aspect of politics, religion or human nature to convey the idea that no human is beyond corruption.
Throughout Gulliver's Travels, the narrator spends a large portion of the story discussing the human body. He goes deep into his explanations where as he includes his own illustration of urination and feces. In each of the lands to which Gulliver travels, he comes face to face with “wastes.” In Lilliput he urinates on the queen's apartment to put out a fire. In Luggnagg, the professors
