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Gulliver's Travels: Gulliver And Swift's Separate Personalities - Essay

Gulliver's Travels: Gulliver And Swift's Separate Personalities

In Gulliver's Travels, Swift and his character, Gulliver, have separate personalities. Swift does not express his views through Gulliver, but through the foreign societies and cultures that Gulliver sees (though is unable to put into a critical perspective).
Gulliver remarks about the Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, laputans, Huoyhnhnms, and Yahoos in a straightforward way, reporting on the cultures, rather than analyzing them. Swift thus disguises his allusions to the political and philosophical though of his time, allowing the reader, not Gulliver, to discover them. The book can be read as a simple adventure story and travelogue (as Gulliver intends), or as a complex satire on 18th ...

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corruption.
Similarly, the Brobdingnagians find Gulliver's culture to be too violent for the size of its people, and Gulliver's pride in describing the English is offset by his puniness. Swift characterizes the giants of Book II to be imperfect but extremely moral, possibly the ideal for how a society could be in Swift's (or our) time.
In Book III, swift satirizes the philosophical movements of rational thought that were popular in the 17th and 18th centuries. The overkill of geometry and other systems being used by the Laputans (to everyone's disadvantage) ridicules the idea of overthinking in something. The Laputans deal in the conceptual rather than in the sensible, resulting in ludicrous theories and ideas.
The Houyhnhnms of Book IV likewise prize the rational, but instead of satirizing them as idiots, Swift shows them to be simply cold. The horses' single-minded rationality deprives them of access to love, art, and other impracticalities that help offset the heartless aspects ...

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Gulliver's Travels: Gulliver And Swift's Separate Personalities. (2007, August 17). Retrieved April 18, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Gullivers-Travels-Gulliver-Swifts-Separate-Personalities/69726

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Added: 8/17/2007 01:07:44 PM
Category: Book Reports
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 354
Pages: 2

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