The Role of Satire in Gulliver’s Travels Essay Example

in a funny way, which makes it all the more piercing. The book encapsulates many colourful happenings which are a delight for both children and adults, even if for various reasons.

Children enjoy the adventures, while grown-ups discover their weaknesses and selfishness cloaked in fiction. A wise man posted this message for J. Swift’s readers: “One cannot work successfully with Swift’s satire without getting dirty” (Boyle 209). I would like to paraphrase it by saying that one cannot unveil the crude reality without getting bruised. Satire is made for getting more or less dirty; it is the shadow accompanying the mischievous ways of the world; the white and just as much the black side of the Yin and Yang circle; it is the mass of clod that both the writer and the reader hape and reshape.

Give it a faultfinding critic, and it becomes poison; give it a somewhat tolerant master, and it becomes digestible. Satire hurts; it is a “sacred weapon, left for Truth’s defence / Soul dread of Folly, Vice and Insolence! ” as Pope depicted it in “Epilogue to the Satires” (Cudden 780). This is just a basic sketch underlining some of the traits of the satire. Much has been said about it and much more is to come because modern Yahoos will never be civilized enough so as to create less opportunities for satire to unfold.

People today are not so much different, in essence. We have better lives, but we still allow ourselves to derail, to lose sense of goodness and reason, to expose ourselves to grotesque. Swift’s Yahoos have evolved, they smartened, but Swiftian observers still

have endless opportunities to unleash their finger-pointing. The role of the satire in this great book is to lift off the mask, wipe the make-up, and tear the veil in order to reveal the wrinkles and the ugliness of society, politics and individuals.

The author’s harsh message is conveyed through a whole canopy of dim-witty characters and hilarious events, and one can almost literally taste the bitterness poured into it. The main vehicle of the novel, used for making us observe, is Lemuel Gulliver, the traveller. Before advancing with our story, we have to notice the similarity of his name with one of the words in the dictionary: gullible (naive and easily deceived or tricked). It would not be wrong to say that this name is very much appropriate for most of the human race, because, although Gulliver travels a lot, through many different imaginary worlds, he does not grow.

It was not Swift’s scope to deliver solutions, but to reveal man’s inability to evolve and the material society. That is why each of the worlds encountered in this journey stands for one aspect or another of the eighteenth century British and Irish civilization. The reader almost does not have the time to breathe. Throughout the novel one meets allegorical creatures such as dwarfs and giants, breathing people and ghosts, brainless monkey-stage yahoos and mouthing horses, or up-side-down so-called scientists.

Each one of them has a precise role to play in the satire. Lilliputians, not measuring more than six inches in height, are a clear example of human’s “petty pursuits and narrow-mindedness. The inhabitants of Lilliput have been waging endless civil wars

caused by a ridiculous argument over the advisability of breaking the bigger or the smaller end of their eggs, of wearing low heels or high heels etc. The feeling of a fatal confinement of understanding within the physical horizon of one's existence contributes an underground tragical vein to the comical plot.

A limited creature will always measure everything by a yardstick which is in fact his own measure. The Lilliputians trace everything down to their own dimensions” (Tupan 236). Few people know that Lilliputians and their neighbours, the Blefuscu people, are in fact England and France, and their pettifoggery over the years. Political satire is obvious: the Emperor, Flimnap, the ministers of Lilliput, they all represent the British politicians governing the Kingdom under King George I. They portray corruption, favouritism, demagogy, and the bicker between the Wigs and the Tory parties.

It is funny how things change in life, how one can be in a high position now, and drop down in the next second. This is somehow what happened to Gulliver once he met the giants of Brobdingnag. Who’s Lilliputian now? It is Lemuel’s turn to be rebuked by the King, or, to put it in better words, it is the human civilization being rebuked. Gulliver’s bragging about man’s discovery of gun-powder and its horrifying uses makes me think of an old line from a martial arts film: “I know a thousand ways to take a life, but none to give it back”, and rally with the King of Brobdingnag.

Satire here does not deny gun-powder, since it has proven its benefits along the years, but the misuse of it –

like in wars. Also, the giants are meant to emphasize the physical ugliness Swift discovered under aristocratic wigs, skin powder and fancy cloths. Laputa, the flying island, is a perfect example for man’s loss of reason, head in the clouds and feet above the ground. No common sense, no science working for the benefit of people, no time and money management, only waste and absurdity.

This whole part of the travels is a parody aimed at the Royal Academy of scientists and philosophers. And as if ridiculous and useless experiments are not enough, Swift sets up a meeting of Gulliver with the Struldbruggs, ghosts of famous historians who have to endure the satire because they distorted historical reality. But there’s more to this: the Immortals do not stay the same, they age, and for Swift this means decay. Probably the most beautiful part of the novel is the last one, but it is also the darkest satire.

It is an analysis of man’s nature, of its “complexity: sense and judgement, reason and feeling, abstract concept and sensuous grasp” (Tupan 238). The Houyhnhnms clearly represent man’s capacity of reasoning and showing natural good behaviour, but their shape of mouthing beautiful horses is a cruel disillusion, sending us to an utopian man. On the other hand, we meet the Yahoos, man’s barren, desolate, basic instinct side. “The irony of this scene forces humans to acknowledge that their characteristics do not resemble those of the Houyhnhnms.

Swift explains man as a rational animal capable of cognitive functioning, but quite different from the Houyhnhnms, whose rational nature and institutions create a utopia, one ironically alien to

humans. The Yahoos, on the other hand, are obscene caricatures of human form and have no reasoning capacity but exist on a plane of pure appetite and passion. The appearance of the Yahoos reminds the reader of the existence of slaves. With these creatures Swift urges the question of what is a human being. Are we abominable animals or reasonable persons? ”( DeGategno and Stubblefield 163).