Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels was a vehicle for questioning the philosophical stance of intellectuals who placed all their faith in reason. The eighteenth century was the Age of Enlightenment in which intellectuals began to describe human reason as powerful enough to reshape the world into a "heaven on earth" (Fiero 136). But there were many who felt terribly ambivalent about these claims. When they contrasted the true behavior of humanity with the lofty heights to which reason should have taken them, a number of writers were moved to resort to satire to "underscore human folly and error" (Fiero 114). Swift was one of the foremost practitioners of this kind of satire and in Gulliver's Travels he employs the most outrageously fantastic societies to demonstrate which aspects of humanity the philosophers have conveniently neglected to consider in formulating their praise of reason.

The greatness of Swift's work depends in large part on the very clever construction of the book and the manner in which Swift makes the reader an accomplice in Gulliver's conclusions. These conclusions are fairly judicious for the most part but eventually the reader is forced to admit that he could be misled by the claims of reason even as Gulliver was. Though the book may appear to be just a series of adventures that satirize different aspects of human behavior, Swift built in a means of bringing his point very sharply home to the reader. At the opening of the novel, and of each of the

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basis of the claim that human reason was the only key to ultimate human happiness. In these parts of the book, however, the importance of appearances becomes much more subtle. The people of Laputa and Balnibarbi do not have anything particularly unusual about them physically. But here their inherent qualities are still related to appearances since the hilarious inability of the Laputans to dress themselves or build decent houses, in other words, to provide for the basics of life, gives the satire its starting point. But Gulliver is not uncomfortable among the Laputans because in regard to his silly appearance he was comforted to find "such accidents very frequent, and little regarded" (176). He is satisfied that he does not look ridiculous. In Balnibarbi the people Gulliver sees on the streets "walked fast, looked wild, their eyes fixed, and were generally in rags" (190). Just as the sloppy appearance of the Laputans was connected to their intellectual absorption and absent-mindedness, the beggarly Balnibarbians looked like people who could not manage the simplest needs in life for another reason -- because they were so intent on reversing nature, they could not even provide themselves with the natural basics of food, clo

Category: Literature - J