Revisiting Human Nature: Review of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

It took me three attempts and a month to recount Gulliver’s lifetime travels.

I started reading this when I was 13 years old. I never got past the Lilliputians.

I finally decided to give Gulliver’s Travels another try. I thought to myself “maybe I was just too young to appreciate Swift.”

Through my perseverance, I found that Swift’s work is brilliant. It is simple yet complex at the same time. As many of you know, Gulliver’s Travels is famously known for its satire of the human nature. Each of the inhabitants of Gulliver’s destination has contrasting characteristics/traits of the preceding destination. Gulliver is big/small/sensible/ignorant, the countries are complex/simple/scientific/natural, and forms of Government are worse/better/worse/better than England's. Gulliver's view between parts contrasts with its other coinciding part — Gulliver sees the tiny Lilliputians as being vicious and unscrupulous, and then the king of Brobdingnag sees Europe in exactly the same light. Gulliver sees the Laputians as unreasonable, and Gulliver's Houyhnhnm master sees humanity as equally so.

I was about to stop reading because the plot became repetitive. Gulliver would set out on a voyage and meet with some misfortune that causes him to land in these strange territories. He takes residence for a large amount of time in each locale while learning the population’s traditions and language. By some absurd manner, Gulliver always finds a way back to England.

The first two parts were not too interesting. However, one’s perspective on things become extremely distorted depending on your relative size to the environment. In Gulliver’s case, being a minute organism compared to the dwellers in Brobdingnang brought him to realize the repulsiveness of the physical human feature. He was small enough to see the unevenness of the Brobdingnangians skin caused by the pores. He was also small enough to see the excrement flies leave behind. If I experienced what Gulliver has seen, I would immediately become embarrassed. I can imagine the Lilliputians feeling just as disgusted. Also, be very conscious of where flies are landing.

I am glad I continued reading. The found the third part very meaningful and thought-provoking, and hilarious. The unreasonableness of the inhabitants of Lagado makes it very amusing. Gulliver visits an academy established to develop new theories on agriculture and construction and to initiate projects to improve the lives of the city’s inhabitants. However, the theories have never produced any results and the new techniques have left the country in ruins. Gulliver meets a scientist trying to turn excrement back into food, an architect trying to build a house from the roof down, and an agronomist designing a method of plowing fields with hogs by first burying food in the ground and then letting the hogs loose to dig it out.

In Luggnagg, Gulliver was introduced to struldbrugs, immortal ones who are forever old rather than forever young. When asked what he thought life would be like if he was a struldbrug, Gulliver answers by saying he would try to obtain all riches and knowledge. However, the king of Luggnagg advises Gulliver that being immortal is a curse rather than a godsend.

Before reading Gulliver’s response, I knew that would be his response. That would be the typical response of the majority of people. I remember having a similar discussion as we were reading Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting in middle school. Would I want to live forever? I would have said yes back then, but now I would not want to live forever. Death is like a deadline. You would not live your life to the fullest or accomplish anything if you knew you had all the time in the world. This begs for another question and a topic for another time: why wealth and knowledge?

The last part was also very serious. In the country of the Houyhnhnms, horses are the master race and human-like creatures, called Yahoos, are the subordinates. The horses were skeptical about Gulliver as he looked exactly like the Yahoos, except with clothes on. However, he is eventually taken in by the horse household after exhibiting some notion of reason. As time goes by, Gulliver comes to both admire and emulate the Houyhnhnms and their lifestyle, and rejects the human race as merely Yahoos. He returns to England. However, he is unable to reconcile himself to living among Yahoos; he becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, largely avoiding his family and his wife, and spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables.

This is the only book I’ve ever read that incited such contemplation. The main point of Swift’s novel is not to recount Gulliver’s voyages, but to view the transformation of Gulliver’s character as he journey’s from place to place. He progresses from a cheery optimist at the start of the first part to the pompous misanthrope of the book's conclusion. Every interaction had an impact on Gulliver’s attitude towards humanity; just as every interaction we have with others effect our behavior.