Gulliver's Travels (Classic Fiction)

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Summary: Satiric travels into several remote nations of the world.
Review: As a result of an astounding run of bad luck, Lemuel Gulliver, first a ship's surgeon and later a ship's captain, is washed ashore in one strange place after another.

First he meets the Lilliputians, tiny people about six inches tall. Next he visits the Brobdingnaggians, giants as large compared to Gulliver as he was to the Lilliputians. His third voyage takes him to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan.

His last voyage is to the country of the Houyhnhnms. On his first three voyages, he sees the foibles and pettiness of humanity by observing the strange humans he meets. But he observes them from his own human perspective. In the country of the Houyhnhnms, he meets the degenerate and repulsive human-like Yahoos and the almost perfect horse-like Houyhnhnms. Viewing humanity (as represented by the Yahoos) from the Houyhnhnm perspective so sickens Gulliver that upon his return to England, he is loathe to associate himself with his fellow humans and requires a lenghty period of adjustment before he can look at himself in the mirror or even eat with his wife and children.

Gulliver's Travels is satire. Almost nothing in 18th century England is safe from attack by Swift's pen. Although much of the book is dated, the same sort of humans that Swift wrote about are still around today.

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Summary: A Fantasy World Brought To Life in a Book
Review: Gulliver is a surgeon whose adventures begin when he decides to go out to sea. He travels from island to island where he discovers a variety of strange new people and creatures. He meets people who are six inches tall to people who are sixty feet tall to horses that act like humans. Each place has something new and different that Gulliver has never layed eyes on. He comes across many customs and ways of living thats he finds to be bizarre and peculiar. When Gulliver encounters the Houyhnhnms he thinks to himself how intelligent they are. He finds them to be the greatest creatures on Earth and can't believe he is a disgraceful so called "Yahoo". I think Johnathan Swift is a very talented writer. To have a book published so many years ago and to have it still be a classic is amazing. To me this book doesn't seem to be a book that a teenager would enjoy. Although I would recomend it to anyone that enjoys the unexplainable fantasy world.

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Summary: Proceed with caution.
Review: It is only fair that those unfamiliar with this work are warned of its 18th century prose, which may distract, if not exceedingly annoy, some readers.

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Summary: Not just for kids!
Review: It's amazing how our perspective changes as we age. What we thought was important as children may now seem completely insignificant, replaced by entirely new priorities, priorities children wouldn't even understand. At the same time, things we used to take for granted, like having dinner on the table, being taken care of when we're ill, or getting toys fixed when they are broken, have become items on adult worry lists.

Your perspective on literature can change, too. Reading a story for a second time can give you a completely different view of it. "Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain, which I enjoyed as a sort of an adventure story when I was a kid, now reads as a harsh criticism of society in general and the institution of slavery in particular.

The same thing is true of "Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift. The first thing I realized upon opening the cover of this book as a college student was that I probably had never really read it before.

I knew the basic plot of Lemuel Gulliver's first two voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, home of the tiny and giant people, respectively, but he had two other voyages of which I was not even aware: to a land of philosophers who are so lost in thought they can't see the simplest practical details, Laputa, and to a land ruled by wise and gentle horses or Houyhnhnms and peopled by wild, beastly human-like creatures called Yahoos.

While this book has become famous and even beloved by children, Jonathan Swift was certainly not trying to write a children's book.

Swift was well known for his sharp, biting wit, and his bitter criticism of 18th century England and all her ills. This is the man who, to point out how ridiculous English prejudices had become, wrote "A Modest Proposal" which suggested that the Irish raise their children as cattle, to be eaten as meat, and thereby solve the problems of poverty and starvation faced in that country. As horrible as that proposal is, it was only an extension of the kinds of solutions being proposed at the time.

So, although "Gulliver's Travels" is entertaining, entertainment was not Swift's primary purpose. Swift used this tale of a guillable traveler exploring strange lands to point out some of the inane and ridiculous elements of his own society.

For example, in describing the government of Lilliput, Swift explains that officials are selected based on how well they can play two games, Rope-Dancing and Leaping and Creeping. These two games required great skill in balance, entertained the watching public, and placed the politicians in rather ridiculous positions, perhaps not so differently from elections of leaders in the 18th century and even in modern times.

Give this book a look again, or for the first time. Even in cases in which the exact object of Swift's satire has been forgotten, his sweeping social commentary still rings true. Sometimes it really does seem that we are all a bunch of Yahoos.

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Summary: A delightfully humorous satire
Review: Lemuel Gulliver is a surgeon/ship¨ˆs captain who embarks on several intriguing adventures. His first endeavor takes him to Lilliput, where all inhabitants are six inches tall, but resemble normal humans in every other respect. His next voyage lands him on Brobdingnag, where a grown man is sixty feet tall, and even the shortest dwarf stands thirty feet tall. On his third trip, he travels to several locations, including a floating island. During Gulliver¨ˆs final voyage, he is abandoned by his mutinous crew on the island of the Houyhnhnms, which are extremely intelligent horses. No evil or concept of lying exists among these creatures. The island is also inhabited by Yahoos, savage, irrational human-like creatures who are kept as pets by the Houyhnhnms. Gulliver wishes to spend the rest of his life on this peaceful island, but he is banished and forced to return to England.
I really enjoyed this book, and I would recommend it to people 14 or older. Since the novel was written in the 1700¡¯s, the words, grammar and usage are a little confusing. The reader also must have prior knowledge of 18th-century politics to get a full image of what Swift is trying to convey. At some points, the author goes into detail about nautical terms and happenings, and that tends to drag. Overall, the book is well-written, slightly humorous, if not a little confusing.

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Summary: Gulliver's travels
Review: Who would have expected that I would come away from this book liking it so very much? Trying to read it on my own, I failed, but reading it in class helped me to see it in context, and appreciate it as a funny, thoughtful, and sometimes cruel work, a satire that can be real fun and thought-provoking once you get into the right mood for reading it.

Jonathan Swift was an Irish-born Tory who possessive of a famous aversion to humantiy in general. (Or so I am apt to classify him. There is something charming about misanthropes, one can really sympathize with them when one is cranky.) His Captain Lemuel Gulliver ends up stranded in various wondrous and edifying lands. I needn't tell you about Lilliput (six inch high people) and Brobdingnag (giants), but you might have forgotten Laputa, the floating island, and the land of the H----'s (don't bother me with the bloody spelling), those uber-intelligent horses. It's that last part, with the H----'s that is pretty shocking even today. You and me are both Yahoos of a kind, and Gulliver sails back to his people in raft with a sail made from Yahoo-skins. With Yahoo meat as provisions.

But there are lots of disturbing, warped things in this book. I remember passages in Brobdingnag with the most fondness. There Gulliver, reduced to the status of a plaything, is quite helpless, and delightfully so. He is dropped into a bowl of cream by a dwarf and embarrasingly discommoded by a pet monkey. The ladies at the court take a perverse delight in bouncing him up and down on their breasts. Gulliver, being tiny, is able to note the physical human imperfections of his captors magnified--cancerous lumps, blemishes of the skin, moles and wrinkles appear in all their sordidness. And what interesting things these are to read about, in retrospect. I think that we as modern human beings--I mean as Westerners, swamped in our materialism and complacency--need to sample the muck in our "entertainment" sometimes, just to get in touch with reality. Tear yourself away from MTV, from the supermodels and the actors, from semi-kiddie porn anime, and admit that the physicality of our human bodies can be pretty disgusting.

And also the psychology of Us, when we don't study ourselves and our values--

Gulliver himself is a little man, a contemptible nincompoop most of the time. I didn't notice it while I was reading the book, but afterwards, I thought about it, and decided so. When he recommends gunpowder to the King of Brobdingnag, he even comes across as significantly--stupid. (Is there logic in presenting a country of giants with the ability to make gunpowder, when you and the rest of your kind are 1/100th of their size? Derr. Not really. Even if you want to suck up to said king.)

But it's Swift on whom I can't quite place my finger... The more I think about him alongside his book, the more ambiguous he seems. Does he really mean to present the values of the H----'s as Good with a capital G in all particulars? (I was struck with their arrogant bitchiness, myself. Perhaps Swift would dislike me.) How about the Lilliuputian way of raising children, is that meant to be construed as desirable? (I do like it better than the cruel Puritanical strain of childraising, all that honor your mother & father ad nauseum beyond the bounds of compassion kind of crap--but the Lilliputian way doesn't seem to allow for that thing called love, either...)

I dunno. You tell me.

Ahh, but don't tell me Gulliver's Travels is outdated, or boring, 'cause I won't believe you.