Gulliver first visits the land of Lilliput. Gulliver is a normal human being visiting a recognizably European society, but he is twelve times bigger than the land’s inhabitants. The Lilliputians are as small morally as they are physically. They are petty and have arguments over aspects of life such as upon which end to break an egg: “[the king] seemed to think nothing ... of destroying the Big-Endian exiles, and compelling that people to break the smaller end of their eggs; by which he would remain sole monarch of the world.” Another example of the moral corruption of these minute people is the distortion of the bureaucratic thievery presumed to be the nature of things in London. The Lilliputians are ordered to stand fifty feet away from Gulliver’s house, unless they have a license whereby the secretaries of state got considerable fees.
Gulliver returns home and promptly sets out to sea once more. He comes across the island of Brobdingnag. He has left a land of small people and has now found himself in the role of a Lilliputian: he is now twelve times smaller than those around him. This entire book serves to reflect on the obsession with physical beauty, which has grabbed Europeans of Swift’s time. He is nauseated when he sees a woman with a cancerous breast; he notes that the flesh is full of holes into which he could have easily crept. When he is in a bedroom with a few maids of honour, he is disgusted when they begin to undress in front of him because of their size and physical grossness.
The voice of Swift, behind Gulliver, is saying "look at yourself, especially if you are a girl, and most especially if you think yourself lovely; excepting your size, in what way are you less vulgar than these Brobdingnagians?'' The king of the Brobdingnagians also provides straightforward commentary on the Europeans Gulliver describes to him. After listening to Gulliver speak of every aspect of European life, he says to Gulliver
“You have clearly proved ignorance…” Gulliver is the first to explain away the king’s criticisms. He says that the king cannot help thinking in such ways because he has been isolated his entire life and has certain prejudices and a narrowness of thinking.
The third book of Gulliver’s Travels is about his voyage to Laputa and Balnibarbi. The inhabitants of this third island, the Laputians, only work with mathematics and science. They are always lost deep in thought and come up with incredibly useless theses and inventions to no one’s advantage. At one point, Gulliver is being shown a classroom by a professor. He sees students laboriously turning handles and writing sentence fragments, hoping to create thought-provoking sentences. The professor tells Gulliver that by this technique '"'the most ignorant person at a reasonable charge, and with little bodily labor, may write books in philosophy, poetry, law, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.” It is thought that Swift was satirizing the followers of Ramon Lull, who had been rediscovered in the late 17th century. Swift is, in general, satirizing the philosophical movements of the 17th and 18th centuries; he is ridiculing the idea of overthinking everything.
The fourth book is perhaps the most important. The Houyhnhnms are extremely rational horses that co-exist with entirely irrational human-monkey hybrids known as Yahoos. Swift uses the conflict between the actions of these two species to set forth the fact that humans tend to describe themselves in terms of Houyhnhnms but act more like Yahoos. This book deals with more philosophical issues such as the nature of man’s thought and the purpose of living. Again, Swift allows Gulliver to reveal the characteristics of Europeans. The reply he receives from the king of the Houyhnhnms is crushingly unflattering: “... he looked upon us as a sort of animals to whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of Reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use than by its assistance to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones which nature had not given us.”
Through his interactions with the people of Houyhnhnmland, his objective perspective on society from the previous books is shattered; he begins to realize facts about human nature. It was on this island and through these teachings that Gulliver became thoroughly disgusted with the ways of his society and wanted to stay on the island and become a houyhnhnm. This time, he agrees with the king of the Houyhnhnms about his countrymen: Gulliver’s perspective and entire life are changed because of his episode with the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos.
The fate of Gulliver is just as important as his journey in supporting Swift’s critical view of European life. As a result of the combined experiences in the lands he has visited and his enlightening experience with the horses, Gulliver has awakened. He has stepped out of Plato’s cave and seen the sun; he no longer wishes to stare at the shadows with the others. When he returns home, he faints for over an hour after being embraced by his wife. He describes her as an “odious animal,” decides that her presence is morally unbearable, and describes her as a Yahoo. He cannot bear the company of Europeans anymore.
Gulliver shuns the culture which bred him: “... the many virtues of [the Houyhnhnms] placed in opposite view to human corruptions, had so far opened my eyes and enlarged my understanding, that I began to view the actions and passions of man in a very different light, and think the honour of my own kind not worthy managing.” From this realization on, he walks around trotting like a horse and spends four hours daily speaking to horses, trying to force himself to be thought of as a horse. So although he comes to understand humanity better than any of his peers, he actually loses his grip on reality.
Richard Gravil, York Notes on Gulliver’s Travels (Essex: York Press, 1980), p.17
E. W. Rosenheim, '"'The Satiric Victim,'"' in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Frank Brady (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968), p.54
Ian Johnston, Lecture on Swift, April 1996, <http://www.mala.bc.ca/~mcneil/m2lec13a.htm> (1 June 2002), Malaspina University-College.
Robert Hunting, Jonathan Swift, (New York: Twane Publishers, 1967), p92.
This refers to those people who would only break their eggs from the larger end; because this view did not coincide with the king’s, they were exiled.
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1992), p.32.
The maids regard him as naught but a toy; they have no reservations about dressing and undressing in front of him. Fortunately for them, he takes no pleasure from this scene. Hunting, opcit, pp.102-103
In 1274, the Spanish theologian Ramon Lull experienced what he believed to be a divine revelation, in which he invented an eccentric logical technique based on concentric disks mounted on a central axis. Lull's idea was that each disk should contain a number of different words or symbols, which could be combined in different ways by rotating the disks. He wanted to prove the truth of everything contained within.
Plato’s cave: ''In the allegory, Plato likens people untutored in the Theory of Forms to prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. All they can see is the wall of the cave. Behind them burns a fire. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a parapet, along which puppeteers can walk. The puppeteers, who are behind the prisoners, hold up puppets that cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The prisoners are unable to see these puppets, the real objects that pass behind them. What the prisoners see and hear are shadows and echoes cast by objects that they do not see. Such prisoners would mistake appearance for reality. They would think the things they see on the wall (the shadows) were real; they would know nothing of the real causes of the shadows. We may acquire concepts by our perceptual experience of physical objects. But we would be mistaken if we thought that the concepts that we grasp were on the same level as the things we perceive.'' Marc Cohen, Allegory of the Cave, March 2001 <http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm> (3 June 2002), Washington
It is important to note that this is not an uncommon outcome to such a journey: the central character, once a recognizably typical representative of his culture, has gone through a transformation which leads him to reject that culture in a way that his contemporaries do not understand: Marlow (in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) takes to the sea for the rest of his life; Yossarian (in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22) sets out in a rubber raft for Scandinavia.
