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Gulliver's Travels (Penguin Classics)
Books: Travel: Antilles: Item 7
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Gulliver's Travels (Penguin Classics)by Jonathan Swift and Robert DeMaria
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful: A critique of human pride, July 31, 2005 Reviewer:Rehan Dost (Canada) - This classic is a fanciful tale worthy of any child's ears as well as a satirical look at English politics and a critical examination of man's greatest weakness..PRIDE. Swift was fanatically loyal to the Tories and his vehemence to the Whigs culminated in his mental and physical decline when the Whigs prevailed. It is worthy to compare Swift's criticism of man's pride culminating in Gullivers moral demise with Swift's own tragic end years after the book was written. The irony is striking. Humanity is personified in the Lilliputians who are small, weak, corrupt, cruel and proud even in the presence of the giant, Gulliver. Here Swift also draws parallels to political strife in England and he is especially scathing of PM Walpole who is embodied in the character Flimnap. In the second book, Swift, reverses the role of Gulliver who is now diminutive. This sudden shift is a literary tactic which enables us to understand just how frail humanity is and the gulf between what we are ( Lilliputian ) and what we aspire to be ( Brobdignagian ). Swift uses the opportunity to show that with great power there is great responsibility which must be distributed justly. These qualities are what truly elevate humanity and are exemplified in the Brobdignagian King. We see that in the land of giants, a people free of pride, there is unity and peace free from corruption. The third books is a collection of tales poorly conceived yet powerful enough to yet again empasize man's pride as his downfall. This time it is in the form of Laputians who represent a parody on the notion that rationality alone is the means to our salvation. In the final book we see man compared to the idealized Houyhynhynms and the bestial and odious Yahoo's. This literary chiaroscuro shows what humanity is and will become when completely devoid of rationality and civility, a brute, juxtaposed with what potential humanity has to become. Of course we are not on either extreme but somewhere in the middle. Gulliver's fails to realize this and sits as a judge on humanity thereby becoming what he despises the most.
Book Description
Shipwrecked castaway Lemuel Gulliver's encounters with the petty, diminutive Lilliputians, the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the abstracted scientists of Laputa, the philosophical Houyhnhnms, and the brutish Yahoos give him new, bitter insights into human behavior. Swift's fantastic and subversive book remains supremely relevant in our own age of distortion, hypocrisy, and irony.
Edited with an Introduction by Robert DeMaria, Jr.
About The Author
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), a poet, satirist, and clergyman, published many satirical works, among them A Modest Proposal.
Robert DeMaria, Jr. is Henry Noble McCracken Professor of English at Vassar College. He has published widely on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature.
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