Plot summary
Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput
The book begins with a short preamble in which Lemuel Gulliver,
in the style of books of the time, gives a brief outline of his life
and history before his voyages. He enjoys travelling, although it is
that love of travel that is his downfall.
During his first voyage, Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck
and finds himself a prisoner of a race of tiny people, less than 6
inches tall, who are inhabitants of the island country of Lilliput.
After giving assurances of his good behaviour, he is given a residence
in Lilliput and becomes a favourite of the court. From there, the book
follows Gulliver's observations on the Court of Lilliput. He is also
given the permission to roam around the city on a condition that he must
not harm their subjects. Gulliver assists the Lilliputians to subdue
their neighbours, the Blefuscudians, by stealing their fleet. However,
he refuses to reduce the island nation of Blefuscu to a province of
Lilliput, displeasing the King and the court. Gulliver is charged with
treason for, among other "crimes", "making water" in the capital (even
though he was putting out a fire and saving countless lives). He is
convicted and sentenced to be blinded, but with the assistance of a kind
friend, he escapes to Blefuscu. Here he spots and retrieves an
abandoned boat and sails out to be rescued by a passing ship, which
safely takes him back home. This book of the Travels is a topical political satire.
Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag
When the sailing ship Adventure is blown off course by storms
and forced to sail for land in search of fresh water, Gulliver is
abandoned by his companions and found by a farmer who is 72 feet (22 m)
tall (the scale of Brobdingnag
is about 12:1, compared to Lilliput's 1:12, judging from Gulliver
estimating a man's step being 10 yards (9.1 m)). He brings Gulliver home
and his daughter cares for Gulliver. The farmer treats him as a
curiosity and exhibits him for money. Since Gulliver is too small to use
their huge chairs, beds, knives and forks, the queen commissions a
small house to be built for him so that he can be carried around in it;
this is referred to as his 'travelling box'. Between small adventures
such as fighting giant wasps and being carried to the roof by a monkey,
he discusses the state of Europe with the King. The King is not happy
with Gulliver's accounts of Europe, especially upon learning of the use
of guns and cannons. On a trip to the seaside, his travelling box is
seized by a giant eagle which drops Gulliver and his box into the sea,
where he is picked up by some sailors, who return him to England.
This book compares the truly moral man to the representative man; the
latter is clearly shown to be the lesser of the two. Swift, being in
Anglican holy orders, was keen to make such comparisons.
Part III: A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan
After Gulliver's ship was attacked by pirates, he is marooned close to a desolate rocky island near India. Fortunately, he is rescued by the flying island of Laputa,
a kingdom devoted to the arts of music and mathematics but unable to
use them for practical ends. Since Swift was in Anglican holy orders,
he, like so many of them, viewed reason as what Martin Luther had called "that great whore" and regarded Deism, whose practitioners attacked revealed religions, with pure horror.[citation needed]
Laputa's custom of throwing rocks down at rebellious cities on the
ground seems the first time that the air strike was conceived as a
method of warfare.[citation needed]
Gulliver tours Laputa as the guest of a low-ranking courtier and sees
the ruin brought about by the blind pursuit of science without practical
results, in a satire on bureaucracy and on the Royal Society
and its experiments. At the Grand Academy of Lagado, great resources
and manpower are employed on researching completely preposterous schemes
such as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, softening marble for use in
pillows, learning how to mix paint by smell, and uncovering political
conspiracies by examining the excrement of suspicious persons (see muckraking).
Gulliver is then taken to Balnibarbi to await a trader who can take
him on to Japan. While waiting for a passage, Gulliver takes a short
side-trip to the island of Glubbdubdrib,
where he visits a magician's dwelling and discusses history with the
ghosts of historical figures, the most obvious restatement of the
"ancients versus moderns" theme in the book. In Luggnagg he encounters
the struldbrugs,
unfortunates who are immortal. They do not have the gift of eternal
youth, but suffer the infirmities of old age and are considered legally
dead at the age of eighty. After reaching Japan, Gulliver asks the
Emperor "to excuse my performing the ceremony imposed upon my countrymen
of trampling upon the crucifix," which the Emperor does. Gulliver returns home, determined to stay there for the rest of his days.
Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms
Despite his earlier intention of remaining at home, Gulliver returns
to the sea as the captain of a merchantman as he is bored with his
employment as a surgeon. On this voyage he is forced to find new
additions to his crew, whom he believes to have turned the rest of the
crew against him. His crew then mutiny, and after keeping him contained
for some time resolve to leave him on the first piece of land they come
across and continue as pirates. He is abandoned in a landing boat and
comes upon a race of hideous, deformed and savage humanoid creatures to
which he conceives a violent antipathy. Shortly afterwards he meets a
race of horses who call themselves Houyhnhnms (which in their language means "the perfection of nature"); they are the rulers, while the deformed creatures called Yahoos are human beings in their base form.
Gulliver becomes a member of a horse's household, and comes to both
admire and emulate the Houyhnhnms and their lifestyle, rejecting his
fellow humans as merely Yahoos endowed with some semblance of reason
which they only use to exacerbate and add to the vices Nature gave them.
However, an Assembly of the Houyhnhnms rules that Gulliver, a Yahoo
with some semblance of reason, is a danger to their civilisation, and
expels him.
He is then rescued, against his will, by a Portuguese ship, and is
surprised to see that Captain Pedro de Mendez, a Yahoo, is a wise,
courteous and generous person. He returns to his home in England, but he
is unable to reconcile himself to living among 'Yahoos' and becomes a
recluse, remaining in his house, largely avoiding his family and his
wife, and spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his
stables; in effect becoming insane.
This book uses coarse metaphors to describe human depravity, and the
Houyhnhms are symbolised as not only perfected nature but also the
emotional barrenness which Swift maintained that devotion to reason
brought
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