"...I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."There are many things "Gulliver's Travels": funny, comedic, satirical, depressing, inspiring, etc. But there is one thing it is not: a book for children. If Swift knew this he would laugh and telll us to boil our children and eat them! ;)
Swift is most likely the greatest satirist that ever lived and his intellect is very prominent in "Gulliver's Travels". He creates his own fool, Lemuel Gulliver, a man of great book intellect but too much wind in the ears. Swift sends him on little voyages to other countries not to give the reader something interesting to read but to shine a light of everyone's eyes. That's why Gulliver is so flat. Swift does not want the reader to understand Gulliver or even like Gulliver because "Gulliver's Travels" is NOT a novel and Gulliver is not a character, he's the human race surrounded by the human race.
Gulliver leaves his wife, who does not question him, and ends up on the isle of the Lilliputians, near Madagascar. There he is bound up and taken as prisoner of tiny people, only six inches in height. He proves these people that he is not only a genteel servant but he is quite a disgusting pig, seeing nothing wrong on urinating all over. What's so wrong with that? But Gulliver's disgusting ways are not the mind grabber. Look at the Lilliputians: they are petty little buggers making their govermental officials do tricks to get elected. Are we not the same?
Gulliver arrives at home only to leave his wife anbd family for the Brobdingnagians, the isle of the giants near the Cape of Good Hope. Now, it is reversed. Gulliver must endure the putrid stinche of these iodious animals and be used as a sex toy for the ladies. Obviously not for children. Swift takes from his poems to show how people may look beautiful on the outside, but we're really disgusting creatures underneath all the perfume. It's quite comical when he describes the farmer's wife's breasts. It made me think how men idiolize a woman for her breasts when they're really giants lump of flesh for nursing.
Part III is quick, Gulliver returns home, leaves and encounters four different people all near Japan. The Laputa's are hilarious, like some of our masterminds today, focusing on the higher level of thinking and rejecting the fundamental steps to these levels. Lagado is very similar except that these people extract sunbeams from cucumbers and do all sorts of ridiculous things that mean nothing at all. The Glubbdubdribs really caught my eye in that they are really intellectual but take pride in their sodomy, raping, incest, theft and other immoral acts. People seem to think genius equals insanity and insanity equals immorality. These people feel they can easily get away with whatever they deem well because they are intellectual.
Gulliver returns home, but I think he finally realizes he is deprived because he gets his older wife pregnant. He leaves her and encounters the Yahoos, the Id in Freudian theory and the Houyhnhnms, the super ego. This is my favourite Part and probably the saddest because we see what a lot of religious people do: reject the ego for the super ego (I do not mean manly ego, I am talking about Freud). I will not further discuss this part since this is the best part.
All throughout this satire, Swift throws a wet blanket on politics, religion (hypocritical religion) and the human race in general. We need to be ego, be human, but no petty, shiftless, disgusting or ignorant. I think Swift truly understands the complexities and simplicities of human nature.
