GULLIVER'S TRAVEL
SUMMARY
Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput
Mural depicting Gulliver
surrounded by citizens of Lilliput.
4 May 1699 – 13 April 1702
The book begins with a short
preamble in which Lemuel Gulliver, in the style of books of the time, gives a
brief outline of his life and history before his voyages. He enjoys travelling,
although it is that love of travel that is his downfall.
During his first voyage,
Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck and finds himself a prisoner of a
race of tiny people, less than 6 inches tall, who are inhabitants of the island
country of Lilliput. After giving assurances of his good behaviour, he is given
a residence in Lilliput and becomes a favorite of the court. From there, the
book follows Gulliver's observations on the Court of Lilliput. He is also given
the permission to roam around the city on a condition that he would not harm
their subjects. Gulliver assists the Lilliputians to subdue their neighbours,
the Blefuscudians, by stealing their fleet. However, he refuses to reduce the
island nation of Blefuscu to a province of Lilliput, displeasing the King and
the court. Gulliver is convicted of treason for "making water" in the
capital (even though he was putting out a fire and saving countless
lives)—among other "crimes." Gulliver is charged with treason and
sentenced to be blinded. With the assistance of a kind friend, Gulliver escapes
to Blefuscu, where he spots and retrieves an abandoned boat and sails out to be
rescued by a passing ship which safely takes him back home. This book of the
Travels is a topical political satire.
Part II: A Voyage to
Brobdingnag
Gulliver Exhibited to the
Brobdingnag Farmer by Richard Redgrave
20 June 1702 – 3 June 1706
When the sailing ship
Adventure is blown off course by storms and forced to put in to land for want
of fresh water, Gulliver is abandoned by his companions and found by a farmer
who is 72 feet (22 m) tall (the scale of Brobdingnag is about 12:1, compared to
Lilliput's 1:12, judging from Gulliver estimating a man's step being 10 yards
(9.1 m)). He brings Gulliver home and his daughter cares for Gulliver. The
farmer treats him as a curiosity and exhibits him for money. Since Gulliver is
too small to use their huge chairs, beds, knives and forks, the queen
commissions a small house to be built for Gulliver so that he can be carried
around in it. This is referred to as his 'travelling box'. Between small adventures
such as fighting giant wasps and being carried to the roof by a monkey, he
discusses the state of Europe with the King. The King is not happy with
Gulliver's accounts of Europe, especially upon learning of the use of guns and
cannons. On a trip to the seaside, his travelling box is seized by a giant
eagle which drops Gulliver and his box into the sea, where he is picked up by
some sailors, who return him to England.
This book compares the truly
moral man to the representative man; the latter is clearly shown to be the
lesser of the two. Swift, being in Anglican holy orders, was likely to make
such comparisons.
Part III: A Voyage to
Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan
Gulliver discovers Laputa, the
flying island (illustration by J.J. Grandville.)
5 August 1706 – 16 April 1710
After Gulliver's ship is
attacked by pirates, he is marooned close to a desolate rocky island, near
India. Fortunately he is rescued by the flying island ofLaputa, a kingdom
devoted to the arts of music and mathematics but unable to use them for
practical ends. (La puta is Spanish for "the whore." Since Swift was
in Anglican holy orders, he, like so many of them, viewed reason as what Martin
Luther had called "that great whore" and regarded Deism, whose practitioners
attacked revealed religions, with pure horror.)
Laputa's custom of throwing
rocks down at rebellious cities on the ground seems the first time that aerial
bombardment was conceived as a method of warfare. Gulliver tours Laputa as the
guest of a low-ranking courtier and sees the ruin brought about by the blind
pursuit of science without practical results, in a satire on bureaucracy and on
the Royal Society and its experiments. At the Grand Academy of Lagado, great
resources and manpower are employed on researching completely preposterous
schemes such as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, softening marble for use in
pillows, learning how to mix paint by smell, and uncovering political
conspiracies by examining the excrement of suspicious persons (see muckraking).
Gulliver is then taken to
Balnibarbi to await a trader who can take him on to Japan. While waiting for
passage, Gulliver takes a short side-trip to the island of Glubbdubdrib, where
he visits a magician's dwelling and discusses history with the ghosts of
historical figures, the most obvious restatement of the "ancients versus
moderns" theme in the book. In Luggnagg he encounters the struldbrugs,
unfortunates who are immortal. They do not have the gift of eternal youth, but
suffer the infirmities of old age and are considered legally dead at the age of
eighty. After reaching Japan, Gulliver asks the Emperor "to excuse my
performing the ceremony imposed upon my countrymen of trampling upon the
crucifix," which the Emperor grants. Gulliver returns home, determined to
stay there for the rest of his days.
[edit]Part IV: A Voyage to the
Country of the Houyhnhnms
Gulliver in discussion with
Houyhnhnms (1856 lllustration by J.J. Grandville.)
7 September 1710 – 2 July 1715
Despite his earlier intention
of remaining at home, 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.
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.
Gulliver's Travels is a misanthropic anatomy of human
nature; a sardonic looking-glass. It asks its readers to refute it, to deny
that it has not adequately characterized human nature and society. Each of the
four books has a different theme, but all are attempts to deflate human pride.
Book I, written between 1721 and 1725, may reflect the concerns of Swift's own
day, and of his own life — it may be a politico-sociological treatise in the
form of a satire; a protest against Imperialism and Colonialism; an attack on
the corrupt Whig oligarchy which had displaced the Swift's Tories in London — a
defence of Tory policies, an attack on the Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, and
on the expensive and bloody trade wars which had accompanied the twelve years
of Whig government — but it is also, on a deeper level, a satire on the
universal human tendency to abuse political power and authority, to manipulate
others and deceive ourselves. It is at once a folk-myth, a children's story,
and a misanthrope's gift to mankind: in Lilliput, which is, quite literally, a
microcosm, the vices and follies not merely of England but of all mankind are
epitomized. Swift points out that when men are six inches tall, their squabbles
seem petty, and their pomp and ceremony ridiculous: he leaves it to us to take
his point.
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