Gullivers Travels

Since its first publication nearly three hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift's satirical prose Gulliver's Travels has been the subject of a wide variety of literary critique and social interpretation. Although many readers, at first glance, take this tale to be simply a fantastic narrative of a common man and his encounters with unusual locations and people through several journeys, further inspection reveals Swift's true purpose of creativity - satire.

Using the then contemporary style of the Travel Narrative, Swift is able to insert his own personal criticisms of modern life into the experiences of Gulliver. Gulliver, representing a common man, encounters a wide variety of characters along his travels, each representing a subject Swift wishes to criticize. Ranging from relatively simply political criticisms in his experiences in Book I and II, to a socio-political criticism in Book III, to the social, philosophical criticism of man in Book IV. It is to this final book that we turn our attention.

If Book IV is read literally, with no knowledge of satire, it appears to be another bizarre jo

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However, upon further inspection, we see that Book IV criticizes the nature of man as a rational being (Crane, 402). This leads Crane to note the need for "rational" thought to determine the level of civilization a creature is able to attain (404).

"[T]here would be a high degree of satirical force, for readers in 1726, in a fable which began with the notion that man is pre-eminently a 'rational creature' and then proceeded to turn this notion violently upside down, and which, in doing so, based itself on a division of animal specias into the extremes of 'rational creature' and irrational 'brutes' and on the paradoxical identification of the former with horses and of the later with being closely resembling men" (404). I find that Crane's essay further explained the origin of the Yahoo and the Houyhnhnm, particularly why the horse was chosen as the "rational" animal. Since this comparison was common knowledge amongst his readers, Swift used the horse and the man as the creatures of Houyhnhnmland. urney of Gulliver, no more unusual than his other travels. It is here that Swift not only is able to satirize on political matters of his time, but on the nature of man and many preconceived notions still existent today. Gulliver is able to see that man, that is, European "civilized" man, is not very different than the Yahoo.

Crane begins his analysis of Book IV by discussing how Gulliver is able to discard his preconceived notion of man as a superior being for a more cynical outlook after interacting with the inhabitants of Houyhnhnmland. Swift's opinion, through Gulliver, seems to say that man is one of the most irrational animals who, based on circumstance, evolved to dominate all other animals.

A particular fact worth noting in Book IV is Swift's choice of the rational creature and irrational animal. Crane then continues to describe how Gulliver is able to come to this realization.

Common topics in this essay:
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Approximate Word count = 854
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

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