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Book Review: Gulliver's Travels

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We had to read this book for school, so now that we’re all finished reading it, we decided to do a collaborative book report.

RED: Before we read the book Gulliver’s Travels, vauge mental images of “classic” children’s fairy tales and “cute” cartoons would pop into the back of our minds whenever its name was mentioned.

It is actually a political satire, which we would only be able to halfway understand if we lived in England in 1726. It is very gloomy and hopeless, and has strong prejudices against red heads, and the human race in general.

Our copy included two “masterpieces of satire” as the preface called them, The Tale of the Tub and The Battle of the Books , which were pretty unintelligible. One of the chapters in The Tale of the Tub was named: “A digression concerning the original, the use, and improvement of madness in a commonwealth.”

Daniel: Gulliver’s Travels is a “classic” written by Johnathan Swift; it’s style is for the most part satirical, and its attempts at humor are futile. Johnathan Swift was a strange man who was officially crazy for much of his life, although when he wrote Gulliver’s Travels he was supposedly still sane.

Emily: As for being a classic… you will have to decide for yourself, but I think it could be called one, just so long as it is not a children’s classic. Some parts of the book were just plain disgusting and inappropriate. There are certainly some elements which put it into the classic category, for example being written in the 18^th century.

Rachel: There are some good points in the book that I don’t quite remember (It’s been a long time) but I think Jonathan Swift could have presented them better. It is a very badly written satire, with lots of disgusting details that would have been better left out. It seemed to me when I read it that Jonathan Swift had a bitter outlook on life in general when he wrote it, which was subconsciously (consciously?) communicated in his book. And of course he was insane at the time.

Lilliputians

Daniel: Contrary to the way most people view this book, it is absolutely not just a good little children’s story. The “plot” in the story first depicts a man who is shipwrecked on an island called Liliput filled with small socialists about the size of his finger. He matter-of-factly states that they bury their dead upside-down, because, they say, In the resurrection, the world will be turned right-side-up.

Emily: Lilliput is a socialist country inhabited by tiny Thumbelina sized people which has cruel punishments, very strange and unjust laws, and does not allow children to see their parents, except twice a year. When they do, the parents aren’t permitted to give any gifts or have any influence on them, in case they should teach their children anything different from how the government boarding schools are indoctrinating and refining them to believe.

Rachel: Lilliput also has government-run health care, among other things. Sounds familiar…

I still can’t understand how people could have twisted the story so much to make it into some sort of a ‘nice little children’s story’. They obviously missed the point of the book.

Gulliver’s Misadventures

Many people think that the story ends after Lilliput, because of the abridged versions and cartoons, but that is only a very small portion of the book.

Daniel: On the way to Japan in the ship, Gulliver was shipwrecked again and managed to swim to an island where there were wierd people with side-ways faces, who were always trying to come up with new ways of doing things but never succeding. Here there was a lot of ridiculous satire from the author and a terrible amount of attempts at humor, the most notable of which had something to do with the people there writing not like the Chinese, from the top to the bottom of the page, or like the Hebrew, from right to left, but like the upper-class ladies of England, writing from the top left corner of the page to the bottom right corner.

Rachel: A review I read on Gulliver’s Travels said the first part was funny, but by the time Gulliver got to the lopsided people and the horses, he says “…[Swift]…uses satire like a stick to beat the reader over the head.”

A website called ‘Book a minute classics’ got it right. Paraphrasing the paraphrase; “Gulliver goes on many travels. He comes home. He hates people. The End.”

Emily: The rest of the book is about Gulliver’s misadventures in several other strange lands, like Brobdingnag, a country filled with giants, and Hyounonym, where savage, dumb humans pull carriages, and intelligent horses are the main race, thus the impossible to pronounce name. From then on the book was basically making fun of nonsense, but in the process, it became nonsense itself.

RED