Gulliver's Travels (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism)

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Summary: Gulliver's Travels Book Review
Review: Gulliver's Travels is a good book, even if you just read it as an adventure story, but when you can understand the wit and satire of Jonathan Swift, the book is great. It is a fictional narrative, written anonymously by Swift under the pen name Lemuel Gulliver. It is about the voyages and mishaps of Gulliver as he travels to uncharted islands, which are slightly different then a normal trip. He meets six inch tall people, visits a flying island, entertains some sixty foot tall royalty, encounters people that never die, and lives with horses that talk, reason, and have men-like animals for slaves. Along with this imaginative epic, Swift adds ironic humor and lays out his ideas of politics, religion, and humanity. Even though it was written in the eighteenth century, it is easily understood and fun to read for all ages. Some of the more subtle references and satires are hard to connect with, but if your book has footnotes explaining certain things, it will make it more enjoyable. I really like this book and I think you will, too.

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Summary: Gulliver's Travels
Review: Gulliver's Travels Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, 1947,306pp.,$5.99
Jonathan Swift ISBN number is 0-671-00174-4

Gulliver's Travels is a wonderful adventure by Jonathan Swift. At first I didn't want to read it, but once I reading, I just had to keep going! In the beginning, we find a young man named Lemuel Gulliver. Mr. Gulliver was sent to Emanuel to be an apprenticeship to Mr. Bates. By being an apprentice, Mr. Gulliver becomes a surgeon on a ship called the Swallow. But when Mr. Gulliver marries and settles down in London, Mr. Bates dies and his business begins to fail, so Gulliver goes back out to sea. On the Antelope, they leave Bristol with the voyage bound toward the South Sea. Due to a miscalculation by the crew, they are already tired and ill when a storm brews. The captain, crew and Gulliver are forced to abandon the ship. Because Gulliver knows how to swim, he reaches land. That's when the half a pint of brandy from the ship forces Gulliver to fall asleep. When he wakes up, he can't move and he finds strings on his upper body. When Gulliver breaks the strings he's showered with tiny arrows and spears from an army of small people. When Gulliver doesn't fight back, most of the miscommunication has ended with this "Man Mountain". Gulliver finds himself in a city, a country of little people that speak an odd language. When he knows enough, he asks the emperor for his freedom back every day. All the while, Gulliver mainly wonders how he will get back home once he gets his freedom, that is, if he ever gets his freedom.
Jonathan Swift, the author of this wonderful tale, was born on November 30,1667 in Dublin, Ireland. He died at the age of 78, and was known as a writer, satirist, and political writer. For 40 years, he had a political career and many were afraid of his political reviews. A political position which he was trying for was blocked by a Bishop and he was soon exiled from England to Ireland. The disillusioned Swift soon began writing Gulliver's Travels, which is a satire on the corrupt English government.
I would recommend Gulliver's Travels to anyone. I would give this book * * * *. This book is wonderful and even though it's been around for a long time, it's never `out of date'.


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Summary: Gulliver's Travels
Review: Gulliver's Travels is a wonderful adventure by Jonathan Swift. At first I didn't want to read it, but once I read the first chapter, I just had to keep going! In the biginning, we find a young man named Lemuel Gulliver. Mr. Gulliver was sent to Emanuel to be an apprenticeship to Mr. Bates, who is a surgeon. Gulliver becomes another surgeon along with Mr. Bates on the ship the swallow.

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Summary: The model to a whole literary genre in England
Review: I am rather disappointed by the book that definitely is a classic. Lilliput is just another image of monarchy, but in no way different from what Swift knew. The criticism comes from the scale of the people who are extremely small. Brogdingnag does not change this approach, only the scale of the people who are extremely big, though in this case there is a direct criticism of the exploitation the « grotesque » Gulliver is the object of. Laputa, Balnibarbi and Luggnagg show a strange floating saucer in a kingdom dominated by unpractical scientists who try to do everything upside down. It is a satire of scientists in general who are so little concerned by the welfare of the community that they can ruin just for the sake of implementing their hypotheses. Glubbdubdrib is funnier because it enables Gulliver to meet all kinds of people from the past and this leads to remarks about philosophers or politicians or generals that show how small and little and even tiny they were. Japan only shows the extreme anti-christian policy that can be reached there and the extreme self-centeredness of the Dutch, which is probably a criticism of the crown in England. But the last voyage to the country of the Houyhnhnms is by far the best because here we reach both a severe criticism of the human race reduced to its animal instincts and behaviors, and a utopian society in which evil does not exist because it cannot even be conceived, because it is totally out of reach for these kind reasoning and reasonable horses. And yet Gulliver is expelled because he is a Yahoo, no matter what, and the natural reason of these dominant horses leads to rejection, after having found in Gulliver�s explanations a solution to get rid of the Yahoo by sterilizing them into extinction, just the way men do with horses in European countries, just a little bit more systematically. This leads to the idea that genocide and ethnic cleansing is a natural attitude, an attitude that goes along with natural reason that says that the species standing in the way of reason have to be exterminated. But the book never reaches that level of thinking, since Swift could not know about such policies that will flourish in later centuries, and yet the Irish occupation should lead him to some idea of what such a principle can lead to. Thus at a second level of reading we find a criticism of « natural reason » though it is not fully expressed and developed. After all it is that « natural reason » that led, already in Swift�s times, to the genocide of Indians in America : they were not human, they were attributed all kinds of shortcomings like aggressivity, the love of war, the lack of cleanliness, a strong stench, and many other elements of the type. We can even note that beyond the genocide, the sterilisation policy will be implemented, but not on males, rather on females, and this in some US states up to the 1950s and maybe the 1960s. And this policy initiated by the Scandinavians in the early 20th century (and it was to last at least fifty or sixty decades) was to be systematically used against physically or psychologically impaired people. Hitler will follow that model, pushing it one bit further. In a way the book becomes then some vision of the future. This book hence is a prefiguration of many other books on the subject, such as « The time Machine », « Brave New World », « Animal Farm », etc. This book seems to be the archetype of a literary genre in English literature, and of course the archetype of many films dealing with the same subject, particularly extraterrestrials.To conclude I will say that such a book is definitely not for children even if it is often assigned to young children in some schools.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

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Summary: A worthwhile edition of a classic
Review: I'm not going to get into the whole "Is this great literature" debate with this novel. If you don't think already this novel is a masterpiece, nothing I say is going to convince you otherwise. This edition, though, is well worth picking up. It preserves the orthography and other quirks of Swift's prose and includes an intriguing, though a bit abrupt (as though written on deadline) "introduction" by Jeanette Winterson, who puzzlingly preoccupies herself with the Houyhnhnms at the expense of the other parts of the novel.

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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: 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: The original satire
Review: This book is probably the best known full-length satire of society. In it, Swift mocks what he feels to be the all the iniquities of the 18th century. And of course, it's far from being a children's book.

There are four voyages and only the first two are known in the popular imagination. In each voyage, Gulliver goes to a country/countries that are radically different from those known and stays with the court/government learning about the country and sometimes helping out.

Part 1 is a voyage to Lilliput. Here, the people are very very small. This is the most well-known part, containing famous satires such as that of the Big-Endians and Little-Endians. The small characters generally satirise the characteristic of pettiness.

Part 2 is a voyage to Brobdingnag. Here, the people are very large. As such, they satirise the opposite quality - that of being overbearing. Here, Gulliver is paraded as a pet.

Part 3 is a voyage to Laputa (and other islands including Japan). Here, Swift mocks scholarship and science. Each of the several islands has a peculiar trait to do with science. Here, you'll find such classics as the novel-writing machine and the country where the linguists decided that words are too indirect to communicate being signs of signs so everyone carries a large sack of objects to point to in direct communication - which sounds like something from a modern academic, except this is interesting.

Part 4 is a voyage to the country of the Huyhnhnms. Here, Swift departs from tongue-and-cheek and becomes biting. The country is a utopia populated by benevolent horses and the humanoids are wild and uncivilised so they're "looked after". As a result of the horses' brilliance, Gulliver becomes disgusted with the human race after seeing the difference. Obviously like all parts of the satire this is not to be taken literally - that Swift despised people.

That's the basic content but nothing can describe the joy, humour, wit and imagination used in the book. It has everything and is an absolute must for anyone who's ever saw something funny/wrong with society (ie. all).

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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.