Gulliver's Travels Study Guide
Fierce travel lovers and curious minds, get ready to feed your imagination with some unique and exotic thoughts. Jonathan Swift created a satirical book that both makes fun and glorifies the art of traveling.
Lemuel Gulliver is a part of a ship crew who due to a series of misshapen events ends up visiting different islands and their inhabitants of various sizes and customs. From Lilliput Island, Flying Island, and to the Land of Giants – the text constantly confronts the protagonist with stereotypes.
Archetypes and stereotypes are explored heavily and the author did a great job trying to wipe them out from the reader’s mind. But can the human nature really get rid of them? This is what makes up our culture, morals, and personalities. The most important thing is to acknowledge them.
The book can be called a manual to behavioral technics for any life situation. The first and second travels are fun and represent a real adventure. The third and fourth trips focus more on the way the society works.
The destiny is kind towards Gulliver and brings him back home after each of the journeys. Be it an eagle that throws the man back into the ocean or a military ship, the man returns home safely after he learned his lesson.
Despite the irony of the text, the protagonist finds a way to get on the right side of every new culture he meets. The characters care to explain the reason behind their actions and their feelings. At the same time, the reader isn’t burdened with too many descriptions and author narration.
The book will be appreciated by both kids and grown up. Every age and the cultural group will find its own meanings and notions in the text. Gulliver is the semantic idol that must be learnt and understood, just like Robinson Crusoe, Romeo and Juliette or Don Quixote.
Author: Jared Russell
New Essays
Out of all the sections of 'Gulliver's Travels' part four is the most revealing and satirical of human nature. Swift challenges the reader to examine the rationale of human beings and to question what is actually considered knowledgeable and important. As part four progresses through...
The success of a satire is often measured by how well it 'awakens thoughtful laughter. ' Based on this statement, Jonathan Swift's novel, Gulliver's Travels, is very successful as a satire because at a very superficial level, it is quite amusing with its tales of dwarfs and giants...
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and George Orwell's 1984, two of English literature's most important and pervasive political criticisms, have helped to mold world opinion by offering new viewpoints and attitudes, yet these two novels differ in their means of conveying their satire of human...
An Irish bishop was forced by Jonathan Swift to say that Gulliver's Travels, 'was full of improbable lies, and for his part he hardly believed a word of it. ' (Brady 1) In a way the bishop was correct as six-inch people, giants, immortal humans, intelligent horses, and deformed...