Gulliver's Travels

6 Pages 1401 Words

Without a doubt, the greatest achievement of Jonathan Swift, the master of irony and satire, is his satirical masterpiece Gulliver’s Travels. Swift wrote his “travel novel” not to entertain the world, but to inform it. The satirical work was written to show the follies, vices, and the stupidity of mankind, by comparing it to the follies, vices, and stupidity of Swift’s mind’s machinations. It was the belief of the author that by comparing ourselves to others, we might be able to see our own true nature, enabling us to see the foolishness and idiocy in our own lives. The text that best addresses Swift’s thought on seeing who we truly are through comparison can be found in the first chapter of the second book where Lemuel Gulliver is lamenting his second voyage in the light of discovery that men are in fact Lilliputian to other races. Gulliver downheartedly says that, “nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.”
In the Voyage to Lilliput, Swift begins comparing the political situation of that tiny, island nation to that of England, and how the political structures of both islands have become corrupted, ridiculous, and petty. In Lilliput, much like in England, the offices of courtiers and ministers were not appointed based upon achievement or skill in public service, but upon trivialities, nepotism, and favors. The cruel and ambitious Emperor of Lilliput has no greater desire than to totally destroy Blefescu, the land across the sea, in a war that has long lost any meaning, and enslave its population. This situation is extremely comparable to the long, bloody history between France and England. In Swift’s day, the two European states were on unfriendly terms whenever not at war. The ambition of enslavement can also be compared to the great European powers’ policy of manifest destiny, colonization, rule, and ownership of the “savages.” In Lilliput the heir to the “Delight and Terror of th...