Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travel by Dai Qiye (ES02160)

Gulliver’s Travel

               —Jonathan Swift

I still remember the first time I read this novel because of my teacher’s requirement in my middle school, at that time, I just read it as a story.

There is such a doctor, holding great obsession for sailing adventure, although he almost died every time, doesn’t lose the passion, he was in one and another one island through series of memorable times, by the way, he is Gulliver. Gulliver has been to four isolated islands—Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and Houyhnhnm. On the very first voyage, Gulliver is shipwrecked. Of all the ship’s crew, he survives, then he swims to the shore of a strange land, inhabited by Lilliputians, the tallest of whom is just six inches high.

“When bending my eyes downward as much as I could, I perceived a human not six inches high”

Now when I go back to read this novel again with some background material, I just find something except oh it’s a interesting story. From the first voyage—Lilliput, we can make a contrast with British at that time. In Lilliput, the official positions are determined by skipping. British was dominated by the church and monarch. In Lilliput, the political party is distinguished by the height of shoes, high height party and low height party, in British, the party dispute is between Tony party and Whig party. The first and second voyage can be interpreted as an allegorical satires of the political events of the early eighteenth century, or we can say that is commentary on the moral state of English. The voyage to Laputa is a sharpened attack upon science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and reveals Swift’s contempt for abstract theory and ideology that is not practical service to human. The final voyage reveals Swift’s ultimate satiric object—man’s inability to come to terms with his true nature. The Yahoo as a satiric representation of debased humanity, while taking the Houyhnhnms as representatives of Swift’s ideals of rationality and order.

As for the writer of this novel, Jonathan Swift, is a master satirist and his irony is deadly. But his satire is masked by an outward seriousness , and an apparent calmness conceals his bitter irony. In his writing, he uses all kinds of techniques of satire, such as direct attack, indirect attack, irony and so on. This makes his satire more powerful, as shown in his “Modest proposal”(the best model of satire in English history).

By Dai Qiye( ES02160)