Question

character sketch of gulliver in easy language

Answer 1

Answered by jill d #170087 6 years ago 5/23/2012 12:05 PM
Character Analysis

Gulliver the Man

As you might expect, Lemuel Gulliver is the star and central character of Gulliver's Travels. In fact, he narrates the novel himself, and he is the only genuinely developed character in the whole book. Other figures in Gulliver's Travels absolutely fade into the background. For example, Gulliver only mentions his wife, Mary, in passing as he stays home just long enough to get her pregnant again before heading out to the high seas. Yes, Gulliver is pretty much it when it comes to rounded, individual characters in this novel.

Gulliver is the son of a middle-class family in Nottinghamshire, England. He has studied medicine both in England and at the University of Leiden in Holland. Gulliver has also served as an apprentice under a master surgeon, Mr. James Bates. Mainly, Gulliver has two great gifts. For one, though, he isn't a nobleman, he's a really smart guy. Also, he is interested in people-watching ("My hours of leisure I spent [...] in observing the manners and dispositions of the people" (1.1.3)).

Both of these traits come in handy. First, Gulliver's medium-class birth means that he is pretty flexible in terms of the social circles he moves in. While he always wants to associate himself with "people of quality," he also falls relatively easily into conversation with working-class people and servants. What's more, his pragmatism and practical nature save his life over and over again. He's not too proud to lick the floor in front of the Luggnaggian King or to suck up pretty outrageously to the Queen of Brobdingnag. Gulliver is the central character of Gulliver's Travels, but there's nothing outsized or heroic about him. He really does seem to be a kind of Everyman, maybe more resourceful than many, but not too brave or powerful.

Second, Gulliver's interest in languages and customs is the primary engine for his Travels. He's good at adapting himself to other cultures. He takes genuine interest in humans – which makes him the perfect narrator for a novel about human nature. (For more on human nature and Gulliver's Travels, check out "In a Nutshell" and our "Character Analysis" of the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms.)

The other thing that's useful about Gulliver's genuine interest in people at the beginning of the novel is the strong contrast it provides with his complete loss of interest by the end. Over the course of Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver has his fill of human company. In a novel about what wretched wastes of space we humans are, it makes sense that the only logical conclusion would be the narrator's complete rejection of people. By the end of Part 4, Gulliver has gone from being a pretty open, flexible kind of guy to being a crazed shut-in who can't stand the smell of his own wife and kids. That's what three hundred-odd pages of exposure to Jonathan Swift will do to you.