Satiric_Gulliver

Ivan Orozco 8-15-09 Period 2 Gulliver’s Travels Essay “Satiric Gulliver” Lemuel Gulliver, the narrator of Gulliver’s Travels, was created by Jonathan Swift as a satirical object. I believe that Lemuel Gulliver is a satiric object whose opinions are the object of Swift’s ridicule. At first, Gulliver distinguishes that his race of humans are high in potential that they are the best race, but at the end of the novel he outright despises the human race, or what he now goes by as the “yahoo’s”. This illustrates how Gulliver does have definitive traits and does undergo a transformation, and that he also is an allegorical representative of humanity. Swift doesn’t intend it to be one of the following, but both of the following. Gulliver’s opinions about humans in the beginning and the end of the novel differ, revealing how Swift is showing us how a human can change opinions and their way of life after being shown the downsides of the human. Gulliver first demonstrates how he is proud to be of the human race after he prevents and invasion of Liliput by Blefuscu, and after being asked by the Liliputian prince to take down the whole nation of Blefuscu, Gulliver “endeavored to divert him from this design…and I plainly protested, that I would be an instrument of bringing a free and brave people into slavery” (Part I, Ch. V). Although it is human for someone to become power hungry and take advantage of a weak people, it is not the type of human that Gulliver believes is the better human. He takes into account that protesting the small princes’ asking of taking Blefuscu makes his race better than that of the Lilliputians, showing that they are of more savagery than of his race. In Part II of Gulliver’s Travels, he is shown up as the race that is more of a savage than that of the Brobdingnags after he proposes to their King that he will give them the formula of gun powder, in which the king “protested, that although few things delighted him so much as new discoveries in art or in nature, yet he would rather lose half his kingdom than be privy to such a secret…” (Part II, CH. VII). The king’s action demonstrated how he believes that Gulliver’s race, though being much punier than his, would do anything to have more of what they wanted, even if it called for an increase in the death toll of their own kind. In the end, it’s revealed that Gulliver is no longer proud of his human race, especially when he said “I happened to behold the reflection of my own form in a lake or fountain, I turned away my face in horror and detestation of myself…” (Part IV, Ch. X). Gulliver was so disgusted of the yahoo’s, that he couldn’t even take the site of his own face, reminding him that he is one of those that he hates. All this shows how Gulliver began with definite character traits, and ended up undergoing a transformation. Jonathan Swift ridicules human nature in the novel by having Gulliver reveal how humans react to certain events and people. He shows how it is human nature to be embarrassed of their nudity when Gulliver some of the Liliputian soldiers passed Gulliver through underneath him, explaining that “my breeches were at the time in so ill a condition, that they afforded some opportunities for laughter and admiration” (Part 1, Ch. III). This scene revealed how Gulliver was embarrassed of having his privates revealed to the Liliputians because they were in a ‘bad condition’. Also, Swift uses Gulliver to represent human nature by having him have a great despite of other humans in the end of the novel, saying that “I here entreat those who have any tincture of this absurd vice, that they will not presume to come in my sight” (Part IV, Ch. XII). Here, Gulliver is telling the readers that he will not communicate or relate to any yahoos anymore. Gulliver is also an allegorical representative of humanity in this novel. Throughout the whole novel, I began to note that Gulliver was a possible satiric object that Swift was ridiculing. Swift is related, in a way, to Gulliver because he admitted that he did not like groups of people, but liked the individual, which is human nature. Humans do undergo transformations in their character throughout their life, and everyone has their defects as a human, or a ‘yahoo’.