The world’s portrayed in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narative appear radically different on the surface. The former depicts the fantastic world of the Houyhnhnms, Lilliputians, and Yahoos, while the latter depicts the life of an African kidnapped and sold into slavery. Despite this seeming contrast, the two works share a great deal in common from being satires of politics and economics to criticizing slavery and prejudice. Two of the biggest aspects of society and human nature illustrated in each work are the dehumanizing impact of greed in the form of trade based on slavery and exploitation of indigenous peoples and lands. This research will explore this theme as it appears in each of these works.
Jonathan Swift is unparalleled in his ability to satirize society in a way that turns everything upside down upside down again and makes the abnormal seem normal and the normal seem not so. This is the case with his adventures for three years on the island of the Houyhnhnms (horse, The Perfection of Nature). Riddled throughout this section are Swift’s jabs at every aspect of society he believes keeps man from his true, noble nature and posits him into a universe fraught with ills that demonstrates, to anyone as sophisticated in reason as the Houyhnhnms, man’s lack of it. Nothing is spared in Swift’s biting satire of everything from imperialism to education of youth. By demonstrating the virtues of the Houyhnhnms, Swift shows the defects in mankind he perceived in many aspects of society in his fellow Englishmen, particularly imperialism and enslavement of others.
The Houyhnhnms represent rational man perfected, devoid of human evil, lies, greed, and other unsavory emotions and weaknesses found in man. Because of their sophisticated reason and rational administration of their society, the Houyhnhnms represent the perfection of nature. In an attack on slavery and op...