Describe Gulliver in Gullivers travel
Answers
Gulliver is kind of an every man's man. He's not too rich and not too poor. He's not a scrawny guy, but Gulliver also isn't a hulk of a man either. He's well educated, but not super intelligent. For example, he studied medicine at a university and served as an apprentice under a master surgeon, but Gulliver also never really engineered any of his escapes from danger. Normally, a hero character that is caught in a tight spot figures out some miraculous way to escape. That's just not the case with Gulliver. He seems more content to just wait out his situations instead of engineering them to his favor. Perhaps that makes him patient.
Gulliver is also a people watcher. He'd have a blast in a busy airport. I suppose that curiosity about people is what led him to go on his travels in the first place.
"My hours of leisure I spent [...] in observing the manners and dispositions of the people"
His genuine interest in other people allow Gulliver to easily adapt to the different cultures that he comes across in his travels. His propensity to pick up other languages also helps him to adapt quickly.
Based on some of his experiences with the Lilliputians, Gulliver is revealed to be rather dim-witted. He cannot understand the ways in which his behavior -- especially urinating on the castle in order to put out a fire -- might be considered offensive to his hosts. However, in many ways, the Lilliputians are, figuratively, so small (and warlike and aggressive) that Gulliver seems practically virtuous by comparison. The Lilliputians have fought countless wars over something as silly as whether to break eggs at the big end or the small end, and many citizens have died over this issue. Gulliver, quite reasonably, suggests that each person ought to be able to decide for himself without fear of persecution. Moreover, when Gulliver refuses the emperor of Lilliput's request that he decimate the Blefuscudian fleet, he shows himself to be rather fair and just. He will not allow himself to be used as a tool to enslave others, and he risks personal danger in doing so. As a result of his interactions in this part of the book, Gulliver seems fairly reasonable (if a little tone-deaf, socially), unlike the way he appears in comparison to the Brobdingnagians.