18th Century Spectator
The Travels of Lemuel Gulliver
Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift, is regarded as one of the greatest satires in modern history. The purpose of the book, although some of the people of the time didn’t realize it, is to critizise his government, his rulers, and human nature as a whole. His generalization of the human condition doesn’t show itself completely until Part IV of the book, where the main character Lemuel Gulliver finds himself on an island inhabited by two main species. On the island there are the Houyhnhnms, horse-like animals and the Yahoos, human-like animals. The difference between this island and reality as we know it is the fact that the Houyhnhnms are intelligent, noble creatures governed wholly by reason and logic and the Yahoos are naked, dirty creatures that seem at best barbaric and vile. The purpose of Part IV is to show the extremes of human nature, and to display both the good and bad qualities through two different examples. Swift makes the good quality of human nature seem more foreign to the reader by attributing that good quality, reason, to a horse. It also puts the period of Enlightenment in perspective for the reader. The main purpose of Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels is to provide the two extremes of human nature, as well as show what position on that spectrum we as humans should strive to achieve.
The "positive" extreme Gulliver encounters on his arrival to the island is the Houyhnhnm, a horse ruled by reason. Gulliver almost immediately admires these creatures as well as everything about them, especially their speech: “Their language approaches nearest to the High Dutch or German, of any I know in Europe, but is much more graceful and significant.” Gulliver tries throughout his visit to become a Houyhnhnm by learning their language, among other things, despite the fact that he looks nothing like them. Throughout his stay with them he was stuck my many things: “Many things about their race impress me, especially the fact that there is no word for lie in their vocabulary. Instead it is described as, the thing which was not. The Houyhnhnms seem to take their life by reason to the extreme. For example, they only marry for the strength of the species by using arranged marriages to yield the best offspring. They also lack any consciousness for their own death, something that almost seems animalistic, not noble. This seems too inhuman and it appears to me that it would be impossible to be that intelligent and noble, yet still disregard the importance of death.” Overall however, Gulliver’s view of the Houyhnhnm is a perfectionists vision of how human nature, for the most part, should be ruled by reason and logic.
