GULLIVER’S TRAVELS

Jonathan Swift’s satirical
narrative, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), has retained its popularity with
children and adults alike for two and a half centuries for its inventiveness,
wit, narrative strength and black humour. The four parts of the narrative
describe the adventures of Gulliver, the ship’s surgeon, among the
Lilliputians, six inches high, the Brobdingnagians, tall as church steeples,
the Laputans, the thoroughly impractical philosophers, historians, scientists
and mathematicians and finally the Houyhnhnms, noble horses endowed with
rationality far beyond the reach of human beings. In all the narratives, Man
is shown in contrast with these diverse creations of Swift’s imagination and
the result shows how vain, contentious, brutal and self-deceiving humans are
and how they epitomize each of the seven deadly sins.