How did Gulliver evolve as a human being at the end of the fourth voyage?
Answers
Samuel Johnson famously said of Gulliver’s Travels: “When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do the rest.” It is a flippant verdict, yet it’s true that most people lose interest in Swift’s tale after the first and second voyages (to Lilliput, land of small people, and Brobdingnag, land of giants, respectively). That said, I have always been most intrigued by the later journeys.
According to literary critics, the trip to Laputa and other imaginary Pacific islands was originally a separate work. It was written earlier and subsequently stitched into the main narrative. That helps explain why the action and idiom employed by Swift differs from the rest of the tale. This part is concerned less with the grotesqueness of human vanity than it is with intellectual pride. Swift’s skepticism is directed at the grand promises held out by the rationalists of his day—the Laputans are devoted to mathematics but in an entirely impractical manner. One passage recounts how a man had “been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.”