Among the most famous images that literature has given rise to – along with the skinny knight charging at windmills on horseback and the husband and wife with hooked noses bashing each other with sticks – is the pictures of the man on his back waking up to find himself tied to the ground by thousands of strings, guarded by hundreds and hundreds of tiny humans. We can find this image on paintings, movie posters, album covers, and on and on. Even those among us who haven't read "Gulliver's Travels" know where that image comes from, and there's a lot more to the book than that. Let's dive in.
First of all, author Jonathan Swift was a disappointed man, and in this work in particular it's not hard to see why. He was a clergyman born and raised in Ireland who eventually rose to become the Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, but it seems he really wanted to go to London and advance further. He never got the chance, in part because Queen Anne didn't like him. Why? One reason given is that she thought Swift's "A Tale Of A Tub" was blasphemous. It was certainly critical of the church. Then out came "Gulliver's Travels," critical of humanity in general in a really vicious (and terrifically funny) way. Let this be a lesson to us all; if you're interested in advancement from those in power, making fun of them, or of human stupidity in general, is not necessarily the way to go.
Getting to the story, our narrator Lemuel Gulliver, although married with several children, has such a desire to go to sea and see foreign places that he gets himself trained as a ship's surgeon and leaves his family behind. He narrates his four voyages, during each of which he gets abandoned by shipwreck or mutiny or some other means at an unknown place with strange inhabitants.
He journeys to Lilliput, where the inhabitants are about six inches tall (this is where he gets tied down to the ground) and utterly obsessed with minutiae like which end of an egg is the proper one to crack; to Brobdingnag, where the people are correspondingly huge and correspondingly virtuous (although his first host, a farmer, makes use of him as an attraction whereby he can sell tickets and make a lot of money); and to Laputa, where the people are so deeply involved in arcane contemplations that servants have to hit them with bladders to get them participating with other people. This last location also has a small number of immortal inhabitants, which Gulliver assumes are correspondingly wise and experienced, but learns that they are anything but.
Lastly, Gulliver gets to the land of a race of intelligent, virtuous, talking horses called Houyhnhnms, whom he learns to admire almost past endurance. This is even more unbearable to him because their land is troubled with a nasty, brutish, smelly race called Yahoos, These vile creatures can be trained as servants if one is very careful with them, and Gulliver is horrified to learn that he himself is easily mistaken for one of them. Even worse, in conversation with the Houyhnhnms, he is forced to admit that human society is really only a slightly more rational version of Yahoo life, and that in fact human reason has only allowed humans to get worse at the vices they already had. The Houyhnhms eventually make him leave their society, and upon being taken back to England he can barely tolerate his Yahoo wife and children, let alone the rest of Yahoo society. He buys a pair of horses, builds them a stable, and spends the rest of his time in conversation with them, not caring that they can't talk back.
My biggest objection to Swift's attitude in "Gulliver's Travels" is one that we see in various authors of all ages; he has set things up in such a way that his antagonists have absolutely no decent qualities whatsoever. In fairness, though, bearing in mind that Swift was a satirist rather than a realist, the fact that, for instance, the Yahoos are so despicable takes nothing away from the story's main point. It even adds to it.
Gulliver's innocence, too, would detract from a piece of realistic fiction. For most of the story, for instance, he takes it for granted that the royalty and nobility of Lilliput, Brobdingnag, and Laputa are worthy of his respect and obedience when it's perfectly obvious that this isn't so. It's only when he reaches the Houyhnhnms that he learns differently, at which point he takes on exactly the opposite attitude, so suddenly that it strikes one as spectacularly unfair. But again, Swift is writing satire, and Gulliver's inability to think for himself is part of the point.
With all of this in mind, "Gulliver's Travels" is clever, funny, and bitterly cynical. Kind of like Swift himself, I gather.
Benshlomo says, Say what you like, but think about whether you want to say it loud enough for those who can help you to hear it.
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