Gulliver’s Travels

Gulliver’s Travels is often remembered as a children’s story about tiny people tying up a giant. That image is only the beginning. Jonathan Swift’s novel is one of the fiercest satires in English, a book that grows darker and stranger with every voyage until it turns on humanity itself.

The narrator, Lemuel Gulliver, is a ship’s surgeon who survives four disastrous voyages. In Lilliput he finds himself a giant among people six inches tall, whose bitter disputes, including a war over which end to break a boiled egg, mock the petty politics and religious quarrels of Swift’s England. In Brobdingnag the scale is reversed: Gulliver is tiny among giants, and the wise king, after hearing him proudly describe England, concludes that Gulliver’s countrymen are a destructive and contemptible people.

The third voyage takes Gulliver to Laputa, a flying island of absent-minded philosophers, and the Academy of Lagado, where scientists attempt to extract sunshine from cucumbers. It is a sharp parody of the impractical science and projects of Swift’s day. The fourth voyage is the most disturbing. Gulliver reaches the land of the Houyhnhnms, rational and virtuous horses, who keep as beasts the Yahoos, filthy, greedy creatures who look exactly like humans. Gulliver comes to despise his own kind and returns home unable to bear his family.

Swift’s great skill is his deadpan voice. Gulliver reports absurdities with plain, careful seriousness, which makes the satire all the sharper. The book mocks politicians, lawyers, scientists, war and human pride with relentless invention.

Much of the political satire refers to specific figures and conflicts of early eighteenth-century Britain, so annotated editions help. The third voyage is episodic and less unified, and the bleak misanthropy of the ending has divided readers for centuries. Is Swift condemning humanity, or mocking Gulliver for his own excess?

Either way, the questions endure: how proud, how rational and how civilised are we, really?