Summary on Gulliver's travel
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One of the keystones of English literature, Gulliver’s Travels is an exceedingly odd book—part novel, part adventure, and part prose satire, mocking English customs and the politics of the day. Because it was one of the books that gave birth to the novel form, it inevitably did not yet have the rules of the genre as an organizing tool.
Divided into four sections, the novel relates four adventures of Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon and sea captain who visits remote regions of the world. In the beginning Gulliver is shipwrecked on the island of Lilliput, where people are six inches tall. Their smallness mirrors their small-mindedness as they spend their time indulging in ridiculous customs and petty debates; political affiliations, for example, are divided between men who wear high-heeled shoes (symbolic of the English Tories) and those who wear low ones (representing the English Whigs), and court positions are filled by those who are best at rope dancing. His second voyage takes him to Brobdingnag, where lives a race of giants of great practicality who do not understand abstractions; they are horrified when Gulliver recounts the splendid achievements of civilization. Gulliver’s third voyage takes him to the flying island of Laputa, which attacks lands below pelting rocks at them, like modern bombing raids. There he finds pedants obsessed with their own specialized areas of speculation and utterly ignorant of the rest of life. At Glubdubdrib, the Island of Sorcerers, he speaks with great men of the past and learns from them the lies of history. He also meets the Struldbrugs, who are immortal and, as a result, utterly miserable. This third adventure, however, is not nearly as focused, and it mainly consists of disconnected vignettes that do not have anything near the philosophical or even geographical unity of the first two parts. In the extremely bitter fourth section, Gulliver visits the land of the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses who are cleaner and more rational, communal, and benevolent (they have, most tellingly, no word for evil) than the brutish, filthy, greedy, and degenerate humanoid race called Yahoos whom they have tamed—an ironic twist on the human-beast relationship. Gulliver then returns to England, so disgusted with humanity that he abandons his family and buys horses and converses with them instead.
Divided into four sections, the novel relates four adventures of Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon and sea captain who visits remote regions of the world. In the beginning Gulliver is shipwrecked on the island of Lilliput, where people are six inches tall. Their smallness mirrors their small-mindedness as they spend their time indulging in ridiculous customs and petty debates; political affiliations, for example, are divided between men who wear high-heeled shoes (symbolic of the English Tories) and those who wear low ones (representing the English Whigs), and court positions are filled by those who are best at rope dancing. His second voyage takes him to Brobdingnag, where lives a race of giants of great practicality who do not understand abstractions; they are horrified when Gulliver recounts the splendid achievements of civilization. Gulliver’s third voyage takes him to the flying island of Laputa, which attacks lands below pelting rocks at them, like modern bombing raids. There he finds pedants obsessed with their own specialized areas of speculation and utterly ignorant of the rest of life. At Glubdubdrib, the Island of Sorcerers, he speaks with great men of the past and learns from them the lies of history. He also meets the Struldbrugs, who are immortal and, as a result, utterly miserable. This third adventure, however, is not nearly as focused, and it mainly consists of disconnected vignettes that do not have anything near the philosophical or even geographical unity of the first two parts. In the extremely bitter fourth section, Gulliver visits the land of the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses who are cleaner and more rational, communal, and benevolent (they have, most tellingly, no word for evil) than the brutish, filthy, greedy, and degenerate humanoid race called Yahoos whom they have tamed—an ironic twist on the human-beast relationship. Gulliver then returns to England, so disgusted with humanity that he abandons his family and buys horses and converses with them instead.
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