Gullivers Travels
Essay Preview: Gullivers Travels
Report this essay
Gullivers Travels
After only a brief stay with his family, Gulliver returns to the sea as a surgeon. The ship is blown off course by a storm in the Pacific Ocean east of Japan and a shore party in an unknown country abandons Gulliver. He finds himself in Brobdingnag where the inhabitants are sixty feet tall. After being captured and exhibited for money by a farmer, Gulliver becomes a prized possession of the royal court. One of the two main story lines in his part is Gullivers many misadventures due to his size; menaced by wasps, a frog, birds, a monkey, and a jealous court dwarf. The other thread centers on Gullivers interviews with the King, who questions him about all aspects of the rest of the world. Gulliver recounts these discussions to show the Kings “narrow” understanding but instead proves the Kings judgment to be very sharp. After hearing the state of affairs in Europe, he concludes we are a “Race of little odious Vermin.” Gulliver escapes when an eagle carries away his box and drops him into the sea where he is rescued by an English ship and returned home.
Some very important themes that the reader may have picked up on can be very helpful. One of these themes is that no matter How small something is, it is not inferior. Gulliver stayed with the Lilliputians for a very long time. The fact that they were only six Inches tall did not mean that he could do anything he wanted around or to them. Another theme that the reader should have got is that no matter how large something is; it still has to have a small amount of brains. The giants in the second part were very tall, but nowhere did the book say that they were very smart.
There was a large amount of satire to be observed in this section of the novel. One of the many things would be the direct relation to lack of food in his country versus the amount of food eaten by the queen. He states “she takes up in one mouth full more than 6 English farmers could eat in a meal.” He states also that the site of this makes him “nauseous” and sick to his stomach.
Swift uses two ways to show irony in the book/ movie Gullivers Travels. He uses the idea that politics is corrupt. One way he does this is that he shows the salesmen as acrobats. This is a way to show that we view salesmen as jokes and that they are some sort of “act.” Swift also show