REVIEW OF ''GULLIVER’S TRAVELS'' BY JONATHAN

 

Title:

        

          GULLIVER’S TRAVELS

                    

                      Author: Jonathan Swift

INTRODUCTION:

 

Although in it’s abridged for Gulliver's Travels (1726) is known as classic children's adventure story, it is actually a biting work of political and social satire by an Anglican priest, historian, and political commentator. Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift parodied popular travelogues of his day in creating this story of a sea-loving physician's travels to imaginary foreign lands. Structurally, the book is divided into four separate adventures, or travels, which Dr. Lemuel Gulliver undertakes by accident when his vessel is shipwrecked or taken over by pirates. In these fantastic tales, Swift satirizes the political events in England and Ireland in his day, as well as English values and institutions. He ridicules academics, scientists, and Enlightenment thinkers who value rationalism above all else, and finally, he targets the human condition itself.

AFTER OF READING:

 Lemuel Gulliver is an educated and trained surgeon. He speaks to the readers retelling his experiences at sea. Presented as a simple traveler’s narrative, Gulliver’s adventures are divided into four parts. The first part is situated in Lilliput, where he finds himself in the company of thousands of miniature people called Lilliputians. The second is on the peninsula-type land of Brobdingnag, an opposite world from Lilliput ,where Gulliver becomes the Lilliputian and everyone is a giant to him. The third part moves to the island of Laputa, a floating island inhabited by theoreticians and academics which oppresses the land below, called Balnibarbi. Finally in the fourth part he arrives in an unknown land. This land is populated by Houyhnhnms, the rational-thinking horses who rule, and by Yahoos, the inferior brutish servants to the horses who bear the image of a human.

Rating:

Gulliver’s travels is both a satire on human nature and a parody of the “traveler’s tale” literary sub genre. The fascination of the tale lies in the fact that although every phase seems immediately comprehensible, the whole subject matter is endlessly complex. The novel offers a clear parody of colonialism and its working against what is conventionally known. I give it (4\5).

Critical review:

 The novel is arguably Swift’s greatest satiric attempt to “shame men out of their vices”. The structure and the choice of metaphors also serve Swift’s purpose of attacking politics, religion, morality, human nature and of course colonialism which is at the heart of the novel. Swift clearly undercuts the ideas endorsed by colonialism by putting forth a reverse scenario and demonstrating how the truth about people and objects is heavily influenced by the observer’s perception. In Gulliver’s Travels the scales are manipulated to show the politics of representation thus bringing forth a comfortless and disturbing satire.