Gulliver's Travels - Satire in Lilliput

A detailed Summary of Gulliver's Travels - Satire in Lilliput

Gulliver's Travels - Satire in Lilliput

Generations of schoolchildren raised on the first Book of "Gulliver's Travels" have loved it as a delightful visit to a fantasy kingdom full of creatures they can relate to-little creatures, like themselves. Few casual readers look deeply enough to recognize the satire just below the surface. But Jonathan Swift was one of the great satirists of his or any other age, and "Gulliver's Travels" is surely the apex of his art.

"Gulliver's Travels" tells the story of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon who has a number of rather extraordinary adventures, comprising four sections or "Books." In Book I, his ship is blown off course and Gulliver is shipwrecked. He wakes up flat on his back on the shore, and discovers that he cannot move; he has been bound to the earth by thousands of tiny crisscrossing threads. He soon discovers that his captors are tiny men about six inches high, natives of the land of Lilliput. He is released from his prone position only to be confined in a ruined temple by ninety-one tiny but unbreakable chains. In spite of his predicament, Gulliver is at first impressed by the intelligence and organizational abilities of the Lilliputians.

In this section, Swift introduces us to t

Chapter III is where it really gets interesting. Look at the types of entertainment the Lilliputians engage in, and why they do so. Swift makes a point of telling us that the only people who perform the rope dance are people seeking to acquire or maintain a high position at court, so this is actually not a form of "entertainment" at all; it's a form of political selection. And, Swift implies, it makes as much sense as the way many political appointments in his day were made-which is to say it makes no sense at all. The exercise in which the Emperor raises and lowers the stick for performers to jump over or crawl under is actually not a test of jumping or crawling; it's a test of one's ability to adapt to rapidly changing conditions brought about by a monarch's whim-and the prize is nothing more than a snippet of thread. And, most importantly, note that Gulliver stopped his game when someone got hurt. The Emperor's exercises go on until somebody loses.

And pity the poor Emperor's son, who has to hobble along the middle of the road in pain. Like any good satire, "Gulliver's Travels" cannot be read purely as an analogy, as some scholars have tried to do. You cannot say that the Emperor "is" George I, or Filimap "is" Robert Walpole. The Emperor is the Emperor and Filimap is himself. But by making the political and religious situations of the eighteenth century seem even more ridiculous than they already were, Swift he was able to make people view their actual life choices more rationally.

Obviously Swift is saying that the argument between the Low-Heels and the High-Heels is ridiculous-almost as silly as the jihad between the Big-Enders and the Little-Enders. During Swift's lifetime, an equally high level of animosity existed between the various English sects which considered themselves Protestant, and between the English P

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Approximate Word count = 1237
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English