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 four parts, Swift takes special care to establish Gulliver as an average man of the educated class. He is neither rich nor poor and he is in many ways an admirable person. He attends Cambridge, becomes a surgeon, and learns navigation and other things "useful to those who intend to travel" (25). He suffers a setback in business, which makes him even more sympathetic to the reader who is then willing to follow Gulliver on his journeys. The open, frank convers...