Question

Gulliver character as a change the man at the end of the novel

Answer 1

Gulliver is a very frustrating character to deal with for a number of reasons. For example, he's not steady; this unsteadiness as a narrator leads us to question the validity of what Gulliver tells us. This means that we have to be on our guard against what he says, and even though he's our guide, we can't follow him everywhere, which is just what Swift wanted. Gulliver makes many apologies for himself and his actions and puts us the reader emotionally involved in the story. Gulliver seems to direct a good deal of hostility toward us, creating a tinge of hostility back at him. Ultimately, Gulliver works as a narrator because we can relate to him and as a result find him engaging. We too can jump from emotion to emotion, but in the long run, Swift is not attempting to create an Everyman. This Gulliver is not, by any means a wholly allegorical character, but as much an individual as the next person. In certain ways, Gulliver proves to be more resilient than the average man is by managing to survive the disastrous shipwrecks and people so foreign they might as well be aliens. Still in other ways Gulliver is a naïve person, bereft of decency and consideration.

Gulliver is an entirely credible and probable person at the same time that he is precisely the person to be the instrument for Swift's satire.

Answer 2

At the end of the novel Gulliver is a changed man. His rejection for his own race, i.e. human race and preference of Houyhnhnms over human beings suggests his dissatisfaction for the way man conducts himself, the way governments function and how vices have taken over and have become the ways of the world. He doesn't want to return home, for he is overwhelmingly impressed by the virtuous life of the Houyhnhnms, but he has to return due to the resistance of other Houyhnhnms who wanted him to either live like yahoo or return. He is left with no choice, but to go back. When he reached home he had huge difficulty in fitting into the rol of a husband and a normal person. He misses Master Horse so much that he buys two horses and talks to them. In a way, we can say that he was massively influenced by Houyhnhnms' way of life.