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Essay / How Jonathan Swift Created the Character of Gulliver
It is said that Dean Jonathan Swift hated humanity but loved the individual. His hatred shines through in this caustic political and social satire aimed at the English people, humanity in general and the Whigs in particular. With a disarming simplicity of style and careful attention to detail to heighten the effect of the narrative, Swift produced one of the most remarkable satirical pieces in world literature. Swift himself attempted to conceal the book's authorship under its original title: Travels in Many Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, of Lemuel Gulliver, First Surgeon, Then Captain of Many Ships. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essay When Swift created the character of Lemuel Gulliver as the narrator for Gulliver's Travels, he developed a personality with many admired qualities by an 18th century audience and still admired by many readers. Gulliver is an honest person: hopeful, simple, quite direct and full of good will. He is a scientist, a doctor by training and, like any good scientist, he likes details. His literal attitude makes him a keen observer of the world around him. Furthermore, he is, like another famous 18th century figure – Robinson Crusoe – encouragingly resourceful in an emergency. Why, then, should a seemingly admirable, even heroic character ultimately become an embittered misanthrope, hating the world and turning against everyone, including those who show him kindness? The answer lies in what Swift meant his character was meant to be, and Gulliver was certainly not intended to be heroic. Readers often confuse Gulliver the character and Swift the author, but this misses the point of Gulliver's Travels. The novel is a satire and Gulliver is a mask for Swift the satirist. In fact, Swift does not share Gulliver's rationalist and scientific responses to the world nor his beliefs in progress and the perfectibility of humanity. Swift, on the contrary, believed that such values were dangerous and that placing such complete trust in the material world, as the scientist Gulliver did, was folly. Gulliver is a product of his times, and he is intended to demonstrate the weakness that underlies Enlightenment values – the failure to recognize the power of the irrational. Despite Gulliver's apparent friendliness in the early chapters of the novel, Swift makes it clear that Gulliver has serious shortcomings, including blind spots when it comes to human nature, including his own. Volume 3, the least readable section of Gulliver's Travels, is in some ways the most revealing part of the book. Gulliver laments, for example, that the wives of the scientists he observes run away with the servants. The fact is that Gulliver – himself a scientist – has little concern for the well-being of his own wife. Over the eleven years covered in Gulliver's Travel Book, Swift's narrator spends a total of seven months and ten days with his wife. Gulliver is also caught in Swift's web of satire in Gulliver's Travels. Satire as a literary form tends to be ironic; the author says one thing but means another. Therefore, readers can assume that much of what Gulliver considers good and much of what he thinks and does is not what Swift thinks. As a type of the 18th century, Gulliver exposes his major values: the belief in rationality, in the perfectibility of humanity. , in the idea of progress and in theLockean philosophy of the human mind as a tabula rasa, or blank slate, at the moment of birth, entirely controlled and developed by the various traits and impressions given to it by the environment. Swift, unlike Gulliver, hated the abstraction that accompanied rational thought; he abhorred the rejection of the past which resulted from a rationalist faith in the new and improved; and he expressed serious doubts about humanity's ability to acquire knowledge through reason and logic. The world that Gulliver discovers during his travels is significant in Swift's satire. The Lilliputians, averaging less than six inches tall, display the pettiness and smallness that Swift detected in many things that motivate human institutions such as church and state. These are small religious issues that lead to continual war in Lilliput. The Brobdingnagians continue the satire in part two by exaggerating human crudeness through their enlarged size. (Swift divided human measurements by a twelfth for the Lilliputians and multiplied by twelve for the Brobdingnagians.) The small figures of the first part and the giants of the second part establish a pattern of contrasts which Swift follows in the fourth part with the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos. The Yahoos, "whose heads and chests are covered with thick hair, some frizzy and others flabby", otherwise naked and running in the trees like agile squirrels, represent the animal aspect of humanity when this animality is considered distinct from the rational. The Houyhnhnms, who complete the other half of the split, know neither lust nor pain nor pleasure. Their rational temperaments completely govern their passions. The land of the Houyhnhnms is a utopia for Gulliver, and he tells the horse people that their country is unfortunately ruled by Yahoos. The reader who takes all this literally misses much of the satire. What does the land of the Houyhnhnms really look like, how utopia is it? Friendship, kindness, honesty and equality are the main virtues. Decency and courtesy guide every action. As a result, each pair of horses mates to have a foal of each sex; after that, they no longer stay together. Marriages are required to ensure beautiful color combinations for offspring. For young people, marriage is “one of the necessary actions of a reasonable being”. Once the function of marriage has been fulfilled, once the race has spread, the two members of the couple are no closer to each other than to anyone else in the entire country. It is this kind of “equality” that Swift satirizes. As a product of the rational attitude, such a value deprives life of its fullness, denies the power of emotion and instinct, subjects everything to logic, reason, intellect and makes boring and uninteresting life – as predictable as a science experiment. by regarding the Houyhnhnms as perfect creatures, Gulliver makes his own life in England intolerable: I return to enjoy my own speculations in my little garden at Redriff; to apply these excellent lessons of virtue which I learned among the Houyhnhnms; to instruct the Yahoos of my own family as far as I find them docile animals; often contemplate my silhouette in a glass, and thus, if possible, accustom myself with time to tolerate the sight of a human creature. When Gulliver considers the rational to be perfect and when he cannot find a rational man to meet his ideal, he concludes with disillusionment that humanity is totally animal, like the ugly Yahoos. In addition to being a satire and parody of travel books, Gulliver's Travels is a,.