Gulliver´s Travels

 My teacher assigned us an interesting reading and posted some comments for us to reflect on. Here you have them.

Initial commnets:

I was struck by the part that said , that  when Gulliver arrived to Lilliput , he  felt so bad like : alone and dismissed , because when he arrived to Lilliput , the lilliputians tread him badly.
My opinion is that all the people don’t have to mistreat people that you just met, as we see reflected in the Lilliputians to Gulliver. But Gulliver had no grudge with the Lilliputians, and Gulliver helped them with a canoe. Even though the Lilliputians punished Gulliver.

The conclusion is that in the life everyone feels like Gulliver, but we never have to forget that God is always with us in any situation, and God never fails us. Also, sometimes it is difficult for us to forgive and forget but the best solution is to have no grudge and forgive!  

Gulliver’s Travels

Discussion Questions by Oscar Víquez

Who was Jonathan Swift? What is he best known for?

Jonathan Swift was an Irish author and satirist. Best known for writing Gulliver's Travels, he was dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.

Born on November 30, 1667, Irish author, clergyman and satirist Jonathan Swift grew up fatherless. Under the care of his uncle, he received a bachelor's degree from Trinity College and then worked as a statesman's assistant.

In 1704, Swift anonymously released A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books. Tub, although widely popular with the masses, was harshly disapproved of by the Church of England. Ostensibly, it criticized religion, but Swift meant it as a parody of pride. Nonetheless, his writings earned him a reputation in London, and when the Tories came into power in 1710, they asked him to become editor of the Examiner, their official paper. After a time, he became fully immersed in the political landscape and began writing some of the most cutting and well-known political pamphlets of the day, including: The Conduct of the Allies, an attack on the Whigs. Privy to the inner circle of Tory government, Swift laid out his private thoughts and feelings in a stream of letters to his beloved Stella. They would later be published as The Journal to Stella.

What literary period does he represent?

Jonathan Swift belongs to the Enlightenment period, sometimes referred to as the Age of Reason, was a confluence of ideas and activities that took place throughout the eighteenth century in Western Europe, England, and the American colonies. Scientific rationalism, exemplified by the scientific method, was the hallmark of everything related to the Enlightenment. Following close on the heels of the Renaissance, Enlightenment thinkers believed that the advances of science and industry heralded a new age of egalitarianism and progress for humankind. More goods were being produced for less money, people were traveling more, and the chances for the upwardly mobile to actually change their station in life were significantly improving. At the same time, many voices were expressing sharp criticism of some time-honored cultural institutions. The Church, in particular, was singled out as stymieing the forward march of human reason.

Define Satire.

Satire is a technique employed by writers to expose and criticize foolishness and corruption of an individual or a society by using humor, irony, exaggeration or ridicule. It intends to improve humanity by criticizing its follies and foibles. A writer in a satire uses fictional characters, which stand for real people, to expose and condemn their corruption.

A writer may point a satire toward a person, a country or even the entire world. Usually, a satire is a comical piece of writing which makes fun of an individual or a society to expose its stupidity and shortcomings. In addition, he hopes that those he criticizes will improve their characters by overcoming their weaknesses.

Why do you think Swift used this genre?

Swift himself admitted to wanting to "vex" the world with his satire, and it is certainly in his tone, more than anything else, that one most feels his intentions. Besides the coarse language and bawdy scenes, probably the most important element that Dr. Bowdler deleted from the original Gulliver's Travels was this satiric tone. The tone of the original varies from mild wit to outright derision, but always present is a certain strata of ridicule.

Thomas Bowdler  was an English physician and philanthropist, best known for publishing The Family Shakspeare, and other works from writers like Jonathan Swift an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's work, edited by his sister Henrietta Maria Bowdler, intended to be more appropriate for 19th century women and children than the original. Although early editions of the work were published with the spelling "Shakspeare", after Bowdler's death, later editions (from 1847) adopted the spelling "Shakespeare", reflecting changes in the standard spelling of Shakespeare's name.

What do you think Swift's view of humanity is? Do you agree with it? Why or why not?

Swift´s perception of the world is represented in fourth trip in his work, Gulliver returns to England before a final journey, to the land of the Houyhnhnms, who are a superior race of intelligent horses. But the region is also home to the Yahoos, a vile and depraved race of ape-like creatures. Gulliver is eventually exiled from Houyhnhnm society when the horses gently insist that Gulliver must return to live among his own kind. After this fourth and final voyage, he returns to England, where he has great difficulty adjusting to everyday life. All people everywhere remind him of the Yahoos. For me Yahoos represent a satiric way of representing the human side of hate and violence.

What do you think the controversy between the Big-Endians and the Small-Endians represents?

The Big-Endian/Little-Endian controversy reflects, in a much simplified form, British quarrels over religion. England had been, less than 200 years previously, a Catholic (Big-Endian) country; but a series of reforms beginning in the 1530s under King Henry VIII (ruled 1509–1547), Edward VI (1547–1553), and Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) had converted most of the country to Protestantism (Little-Endianism), in the Episcopalian form of the Church of England. At the same time, revolution and reform in Scotland (1560) had also converted that country to Presbyterian Protestantism, which led to fresh difficulties when England and Scotland were united under one ruler, James I (1603–25).

Swift was satirizing the fact that often wars are fought over the most trivial of things (breaking eggs at the opposite ends) and some take this to mean that he was ridiculing the wars between England and France. However, more credence is given to the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, essentially they are both Christian, just like Lilliput and Blefescu are the same race, but they have trivial differences that are blown out of all proportion. England had previously been a Catholic country (big-endian) but was now a Protestant country (little-endian). 

In Lilliput eggs were originally broken at the big end but then one particular Emperor decreed that eggs should be broken at the little end. This later led to uproar and six rebellions between the big endians and the little endians, and one Emperor was actually killed over it. The neighbouring island of Blefescu still adhere to Big-endianism and insist on breaking their eggs at the big end, while Lilliput are Little- endians. They are presently at war over the matter. 

What do we learn about the Lilliputians with the knowledge that they believe no other kingdoms exist except those of Lilliput and Blefuscu?

The idea of a perfect world calls the attention of different people. Like many narratives about voyages to nonexistent lands, Gulliver’s Travels explores the idea of utopia—an imaginary model of the ideal community. The idea of a utopia is an ancient one, going back at least as far as the description in Plato’s Republic of a city-state governed by the wise and expressed most famously in English by Thomas More’s Utopia. Swift nods to both works in his own narrative, though his attitude toward utopia is much more skeptical, and one of the main aspects he points out about famous historical utopias is the tendency to privilege the collective group over the individual. The children of Plato’s Republic are raised communally, with no knowledge of their biological parents, in the understanding that this system enhances social fairness. Swift has the Lilliputians similarly raise their offspring collectively, but its results are not exactly utopian, since Lilliput is torn by conspiracies, jealousies, and backstabbing.

Why does Gulliver have such a strong reaction against the Yahoos when he first sees them?

This idea that people living outside of Europe were somehow closer to nature or less tainted by civilization was a common one in Swift's day. Gulliver returns to the sea as the captain of a merchantman as he is bored with his employment as a surgeon. On this voyage he is forced to find new additions to his crew, whom he believes to have turned the rest of the crew against him. His crew then mutiny, and after keeping him contained for some time resolve to leave him on the first piece of land they come across and continue as pirates. He is abandoned in a landing boat and comes upon a race of hideous, deformed and savage humanoid creatures to which he conceives a violent antipathy. Shortly afterwards he meets a race of horses who call themselves Houyhnhnms (which in their language means "the perfection of nature"); they are the rulers, while the deformed creatures called Yahoos are human beings in their base form. Gulliver becomes a member of a horse's household, and comes to both admire and emulate the Houyhnhnms and their lifestyle, rejecting his fellow humans as merely Yahoos endowed with some semblance of reason which they only use to exacerbate and add to the vices Nature gave them. However, an Assembly of the Houyhnhnms rules that Gulliver, a Yahoo with some semblance of reason, is a danger to their civilization, and expels him. He is then rescued, against his will, by a Portuguese ship, and is surprised to see that Captain Pedro de Mendez, a Yahoo, is a wise, courteous and generous person. He returns to his home in England, but he is unable to reconcile himself to living among 'Yahoos' and becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, largely avoiding his family and his wife, and spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables; in effect becoming insane. This book uses coarse metaphors to describe human depravity, and the Houyhnhms are symbolized as not only perfected nature but also the emotional barrenness which Swift maintained that devotion to reason brought.

Who are the Struldbruggs? Are they happy to have eternal life? Why or why not?

“That which I do not fear a problem will never be” Oscar Víquez. I tried to find a quote that might represent why they do not fear death, since I did not find any I created my own.

Swift's work depicts the evil of immortality without eternal youth. They are easily recognized by a red dot above their left eyebrow. They are normal human beings until they reach the age of thirty, at which time they become dejected. Upon reaching the age of eighty they become legally dead, and suffer from many ailments including the loss of eyesight and the loss of hair.

What was your favorite voyage in the story? Why?

Definitely when there is personal growth that would be my favorite part. The second voyage is to Brobdingnag, a land of Giants where Gulliver seems as small as the Lilliputians were to him. Gulliver is afraid, but his keepers are surprisingly gentle. He is humiliated by the King when he is made to see the difference between how England is and how it ought to be. Gulliver realizes how revolting he must have seemed to the Lilliputians.