Gulliver's Travels Analysis Essay

1227 Words5 Pages
In Jonathan Swift's book "Gulliver's Travels," the speaker, Lemuel Gulliver recounts his amazing journeys in a travel diary. He recounts voyages to four countries or islands of great mystique and wonder. The inhabitants of these islands are each different and represent different social and political attitudes of the time. Swift uses these islands to satirize many of the events that were going on in the early 1700's. Two of his four major voyages to: Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the country of the Houyhnhnms, allow Swift to give his commentary on British society of the period. It is the large contrast between Lilliput and Brobingnag that exemplifies that real world and the moralistic world that Swift imagines. The first island that Gulliver stumbles across, after being shipwrecked by a savage sea storm, is Lilliput. He first discovers the Lilliputians when he first awakens tied down by a foreign race. Lilliput is the kingdom of tiny people all about six inches in size. Dispite their size they are very forceful and dictating society. After they had transported, fed and chained Gulliver, they signed him into social contract and begin to exploit him. This contract restricted everything that he could do and also bound him to "be our ally against our enemies in the island of Blefescu, and do his utmost to destroy their fleet, which is now preparing to invade us." They also had Gulliver survey the land and take a scout to map the island. But this is just orders the Emporer and leaders of the Lilliputians agreed upon. The Lilliputians as a society tend to be very clean, educated and odd civilization. While most of the citizens are educated the learn a very indefinable in nature. They also bury their dead in the most peculiar way. The law states that they must crack eggs on the small end or else they will be exiled or persecuted. The dead are buried with
Open Document