Allegory and Satire in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels

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Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" is not merely the story of "Gulliver's Travels" visits to the four islands but it tells something more significance. Some critics interpret the work as an allegory and also as a political satire. Firstly, an allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has a moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy. Thus an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning. Moreover, writers use allegory to add different layers of meanings to their works. Allegory makes their stories and characters multidimensional, so that they stand for. Allegory allows writers to put forward their moral and political point of views. A careful study of an allegorical piece of writing can give us an insight into its writer's mind as how he views the world and how he wishes the world to be. Secondly, satire is an attack on or criticism of any stupidity or vice in the form of scathing humor, or a critique of what the author sees as dangerous religious, political, moral, or social standards. Satire became an especially popular technique used during the Enlightenment, in which it was believed that an artist could correct folly by using art as a mirror to reflect society. When people viewed the satire and saw their faults magnified in a distorted reflection, they could see how ridiculous their behavior was and then correct that tendency in themselves. On the one hand, “Gulliver’s Travels” is an allegorical work. This allegory has been divided into four sections referring to four voyages of the protagonist Gulliver. Gulliver gives the detailed account of his visits to four different islands and tells

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