Gullivers Travels by Jonathan Swift - Essay Example

Gulliver's Travels At the beginning of the story Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, the main character Gulliver is seen as an innocent, but he gradually changes in accordance with his experiences which are reflected in the ways he is treated by, responds to and behaves toward others he meets upon his encounters. Through his experiences, Gulliver becomes a cynical character aware that none of the individuals he meets achieve full their full potential because they were fooling themselves under the disguise of greatness. What Gulliver's Travels seems to be saying about people is that they are generally stupid and wicked, but that they don't have to be. On his first adventure, the innocent Gulliver meets up with the Lilliputians, tiny people who are able to overwhelm him with their intelligence and technology. For example, wondering why he was awarded enough daily food and drink for 1724 Lilliputians, Gulliver learned that "his majesty's mathematicians, having taken the height of my body by the help of a quadrant, and finding it to exceed theirs in the proportion of twelve to one, they concluded from the similarity of their bodies, that mine must contain at least 1724 of theirs, and consequently would require as much food as was necessary to support that number of Lilliputians" (Swift 39). As he wins their trust, he is freed from the bonds he wore upon awaking in their realm and begins adopting the roles of a good citizen in keeping with the articles under which he'd been set free. However, he has also learned by this point that those who govern the realm have been selected not for their intelligence or logical practice, but for their ability to dance on a rope or to jump or creep over or under a stick as the king desired. He who entertained the king most was he who gained the most prestigious position. However, as Gulliver found out when he refused to take part in putting the people of Bleguscu into slavery, even highly valued heroes of the realm faced death when crossing the king: "Of so little weight are the greatest services to princes, when put into the balance with a refusal to gratify their passions" (Swift 51). As Gulliver discovers these great-hearted people are actually very trivial on the inside, he loses some of his innocence about the greatness of leaders. Gulliver’s second voyage is an inversion of his first as he arrives in Brobdingnag, a land of giants and no longer so innocent. As he observes the giants working around him, he reflects, "as human creatures are observed to be more savage and cruel in proportion to their bulk, what could I expect but to be a morsel in the mouth of the first among these enormous barbarians that should happen to seize me?" (Swift 91). In this land, he is discovered not by a king but by a peasant farmer and treated kindly as if he were an odd pet. However, whether the pet of the farmer's daughter or the queen, he finds himself constantly on display and expected to perform tricks of various sorts. Again, though he learns their language and does his best to entertain the giants, Gulliver begins to be repulsed by their actions. While he no longer assumes they are barbarians, Gulliver learns even the king does not have a firm grasp of the politics occurring within his own court. "No law in that country must exceed in words the number of letters in their alphabet, which consists only of two and twenty ... They are expressed in the most plain and simple terms, wherein most people are not mercurial enough to discover above one interpretation" (Swift 162). Like the Lilliputians, Gulliver discovers the giants may be decent in heart, but greatly self-restricted in mind. Gulliver's third voyage takes him to Laputa as a man who no longer expects to find much goodness in others. The astonishing habit of the flappers is explained almost immediately as a means of illustrating the impractical way in which the thinkers of the island lived. Because he didn't need such a device in order to pay attention to what was happening around him, Gulliver admits "his majesty, and the whole court, [had] a very mean opinion of my understanding" (ch. 18). Dominated by thought, Gulliver learns on Laputa that highly educated doesn’t necessarily equate with sensible, historical figures were not always heroic and age does not always bring wisdom. "Although they are dexterous enough upon a piece of paper, in the management of the rule, the pencil, and the divider, yet in the common actions and behaviour of life, I have not seen a more clumsy, awkward, and unhandy people, nor so slow and perplexed in their conceptions upon all other subjects, except those of mathematics and music" (ch. 18). Gulliver’s adventures in Laputa illustrate Swift’s negative opinion of the general value of science produced by the Royal Society as the scientists and doctors of the floating city continuously spend their time involved in meaningless pursuits that bring benefit to no one. Through his adventures, Gulliver consistently finds his innocent assumptions about people in leadership roles, people of the fields and people of intellect challenged and negated. In most of these cases, their limitations are created not by their size or their positions in life, but instead by their willful suppression of some aspect of their being. For the Lilliputians, no one could question the king's whims and therefore everyone made it their habit to do whatever they thought would please this king regardless of what it might mean for the welfare of the country. The giants, although they seemed to value the kind of practicality that the Lilliputians denied, this was taken to such an extreme that intelligent politics was denied. In Laputa, intelligence and science were highly valued in ways that had not been in other places, but again, taken to a ridiculous degree to the point where it was no longer productive. Throughout, Swift continues to build the case that people are stupid and wicked not because they wish to be, but because of what they deny in themselves. Works Cited Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. New York: Penguin Books, 1726 (reprint 2003). Print. Read More