Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift | Summary & Analysis

In the introduction to Gulliver's Travels, readers meet the narrator Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon who takes to the seas and has completed many voyages without incident. A storm wrecks the ship, and Gulliver is the sole survivor. In the rising action, he washes up on the shores of Lilliput, an island populated by people only six inches tall. Gulliver flees to Blefuscu and soon encounters an English ship and returns home to his family in England. Gulliver soon sets out on another journey that leaves him stranded in Brobdingnag, a land populated by giants. Gulliver lives for two harrowing years in the Brobdingnaggy in court. On an outing to the beach, a bird picks up Gulliver's carrying box and drops it into the sea. Another English vessel finds the box afloat in the water, and the crew returns Gulliver home again. Within weeks of his homecoming, Gulliver accepts a voyage to the East Indies. He encounters the floating island of Laputa and is taken to the Laputan city in the sky. On Balnabarby, Gulliver encounters projectors, men who've been briefly educated in Laputa attempt to improve life in their country through a series of absurd scientific theories and wacky experiments. Gulliver then travels to the nearby island of Glub Dub Drib, where the governor uses his magical powers to allow Gulliver to converse with dead figures from history. Gulliver moves on to Lugnag, where he learns that the potential cost of immortality is a lifetime of unending old age, then returns to England by way of Japan and Holland. A few months later, he's offered the chance to captain a voyage, so he sets off again. In the climax of the novel, Gulliver's crew mutinies and leaves him on an island populated by intelligent horses called Huenems and primitive humans called Yahoos. He comes to hate his own Yahoo heritage and vows never to return to England. In the following action, the Huenem leaders decide a Yahoo cannot live with a Huenem family, and they cast him out of their society. In the resolution, Gulliver returns yet again to his family in England. He spends years readjusting the life among the Yahoos, but prefers the horses' company to his wife's. Six creative characters speak for their strange worlds in Jonathan Swift's epic of adventure, Gulliver's Travels. Lemuel Gulliver is a true adventurer. A surgeon on a ship, the last of his voyages are the strangest he's ever known. He's taken prisoner by a race of tiny men called the Lilliputians, then he becomes a pet for the giants of Brobdingnag. Later he visits a floating island in the sky called Laputa, and then visits the quirky academies of Laputa's sister island below, Balnabarby. He talks to the dead on Glub Dub Drib, and meets immortals on Lugnag. His final adventure finds him living with horses called the Houenems, discovering the deep flaws of the human race. Having learned about the evils of his own species, Gulliver reluctantly returns home. The very tiny emperor of Lilliput treats Gulliver well, as long as he believes Gulliver is showing him respect and obedience. In fact, the emperor expects obedience from everyone in his court. Disobedience is met with a death sentence, even when Gulliver simply prefers not to aid the emperor in subjugating his enemies. Glumdulclitch is the name Gulliver calls the farm girl who becomes his caretaker, as it means little nurse. The young girl is devoted to Gulliver, keeping him comfortable as her father works Gulliver practically to death by making him perform for money. Her kindness and devotion provides Gulliver with a safe and comfortable life in Brobdingnag, until he gets stolen by a bird and dropped into the ocean. The king of Laputa, like his subjects, absorbs himself in the abstract contemplations of science, mathematics, and astronomy. Still, he's a monarch, and that means he's subject to the abuse of power all monarchs display on some level in Gulliver's travels. The Houenum master treats Gulliver with kindness and provides him with a home and sustenance, in keeping with the Houenum principles of benevolence and hospitality. He's deeply critical of Gulliver's accounts of life in Europe, and his criticism eventually convinces Gulliver of his own inferiority. The governor of Glubdubdrib is a mysterious, feared figure. A necromancer, meaning he can raise the dead to serve him, he shows Gulliver total hospitality, going beyond the standard provisions of food and shelter, and offering to use his own magical gifts to allow Gulliver an extraordinary and life-changing opportunity to talk to dead leaders and scholars from history. The five key symbols in Gulliver's travels are the various strange peoples Gulliver encounters, starting with the Lilliputians. The little Lilliputians represent the human tendency to consider themselves the most important creatures in the universe, but their tiny size and insignificance in the world as a whole reveals the error in this belief. The emperor has little regard for his neighbors, because his beliefs differ from theirs, and he thinks his own importance justifies the lives that may be lost if the war continues. The Brobdingnagian size symbolically magnifies their best and worst aspects, representing how all humans have the capacity for great good and beauty, as well as ugliness and evil. The farmer's family, Gulliver's first acquaintances in Brobdingnag, illustrate both extreme greed and extreme kindness. The Lilliputians and their ground-dwelling counterparts on Bal-Nabarbi symbolize the futility of seeking knowledge without the means or desire to put it to practical use. From their floating island, the Lilliputians eschew most normal human interactions, preferring a life of the mind, puzzling over mysteries of mathematics, physics, and astronomy all day. On Bal-Nabarbi, the projectors engage in studies and experiments with the aim of improving their lives and the lives of the people, but their understanding of science and other topics is so incomplete that they lack the ability to construct useful experiments or learn anything that might accomplish their goals. The Houenems symbolize the rule of rational thinking and the benefits of collective living, but also the loss of individual identity that comes with extreme devotion to reason. Rationality has allowed the Houenems to construct a peaceful, inwardly harmonious culture based on benevolence and friendship, yet they are also overly beholden to the culture's rules and norms. The Yahoos symbolize a complete loss of rationality in a primitive state, but they also show how ongoing oppression can, in fact, drive humans into this primitive state. Yahoos fight one another, hoard stones, and on one occasion a female tries to sexually accost Gulliver. At the same time, the Yahoos have little and are subject to abuse, enslavement, and rejection by the Houenems, which introduces a chicken-and-egg scenario. Are the Yahoos rejected because they're primitive, or are they violent because they've been rejected? Gulliver's Travels is an amazing imaginative novel full of heady themes. The abuse of power, the cerebral versus the real world, society versus individual, and perspective. Gulliver encounters a number of monarchs and leaders, from tiny to giant, from practical to esoteric, and they all take advantage of their superior position in some way by engaging in the abuse of power. They either demand absolute obedience from their subjects through humiliating rituals, as is the case with the king of Lugnag, who makes his subjects lick the floor, or they exhibit extreme incompetence, as is the case with the Lilliputian king, who engages in an ill-conceived war with his neighbors. Even Houenems, whom Gulliver idealizes, exploit the lesser species of their island, the Yahoos, through extreme prejudice. Cerebral versus real world is another key theme. The cultures Gulliver encounters in his travels either take practicality to an extreme, rendering their practicality impractical, or focus on abstract ideas and pure reason in ways that make life difficult, for their own people or for others. For example, the Lipputans are the most scientifically and mathematically advanced culture Gulliver encounters, yet they're unable to craft a decent suit of clothes, and their knowledge of the universe causes them tremendous anxiety. Likewise, the Houenems focus on pure reason as the governing principle of their society, causes them to miss out on some of the emotional experiences, love in particular, that give life meaning. What is knowledge, after all, without action? Society versus individual is a theme that speaks to the way all of the cultures in the countries Gulliver visits demand a certain level of conformity from their citizens, whether that means following the rules set up in the royal courts, or adhering to broader social conventions. These rules often create problems for people who break them, or for those who want to break the conventions but feel pressure that prevents them from doing so. Perspective is the final major theme. Nothing in the world of Gulliver's travels is purely objective, not even the size and shape of human beings. All reality is filtered through the lens of each specific society, rendering all understanding of the world, even the narrator Gulliver's, totally subjective. Bodies, language, and reversal are the central motifs in Jonathan Swift's masterwork of satire and adventure, Gulliver's Travels. Variations in physical form are used to illustrate larger differences in cultural philosophy between the different nations Gulliver visits. Bodily functions and sickness, and how different cultures deal with these issues, also provide a telling glimpse at their ways of thinking. Gulliver has a great facility with language, which serves him well as he visits new lands. He speaks many languages and learns new ones quickly. The language barrier allows Gulliver and his hosts to discover one another more slowly, and drives conflict, but the learning of languages also bridges the divides between cultures. Reversals of the normal order of things drive the changes in perspective that allow Gulliver to learn from his travel experiences and experience growth. Reversals are driven by differences in physical size, as in the lands of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, and by intellectual differences, as seen in Laputa and Balnobarby. And perhaps the best example of all is Gulliver's time with the Huenems, which reverses the established order between man, well, savage Yahoo, and horse, intelligent Huenem.