Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels has been described by one critic as a Christian work emphasizing man's weakness. In the various journeys, this weakness is found in different human activities. In the voyage to Lilliput, human weakness is found primarily in the political realm, though other human activities as well are shown to bring out the weakness in the people involved. An examination of the voyage to Lilliput will illustrate how this is accomplished.
The world of politics in Lilliput mirrors much of the political world in Europe at the time of the writing of this work, but it is not necessary to know the specific correlations that can be demonstrated to see how foolish much of the political action taken by the Lilliputians really is or how foolish so many human actions are when examined in this way. The people of Lilliput are tiny but think of themselves as masters of the world, and they are indeed masters of the giant Gulliver who has now landed in their midst. Swift makes the machinations of government, the divisions of politics, and the prejudices of the people all the more foolish because the people are so small, their concerns are presumably miniscule when compared to the grandeur of Europe (as Gulliver believes), and because the reasons for the divisions in this society are so simplistic. The realm is divided between the High heels and the Low heels. There is also a religious dispute raging in Lilliputian society over which end of the egg one is to break, the large end or the small end, each of which has its faction. The King of Blefuscu has been able to take advantage of this argument to divide the people and to attract the Big-Endians to his cause of overthrowing the leadership of Lilliput.
The physical size of the people of Lilliput becomes a metaphor for their moral level as well--they are truly small people, small-minded, small morally, small politically. They are revealed to be petty over time as the...