The use of satire in Gulliver’s Travels to expose the follies of humanity
A man`s personality and his motif has a lot of impact on his behavior. Man`s nature and his way of reacting is inclusive of his personality and emotions. To bring this out more clearly the character of Gulliver in the famous novel by Jonathan Swift has been taken into account. Jonathan Swift took a man as his object to portray the faults of the society.
Jonathan Swift used the means of satire in his play to bring out the follies of men in his novel (Ross, 2013). He composed the character of Gulliver who had variety of emotions in him but the audience got to know about his emotions only when he faced different situations in different places. Gulliver loved adventure and because of this, he travelled in all the places. In the novel the readers found him in the land of Lilliput at first, then at the land of the giants, then in the land of Laputa and finally in the land of Houghnhnms and the Yahoos (Mackie, 2014).
In the land of Lilliput Gulliver explores the weaknesses of the politicians and realizes the abstract form of it. The abstract form of government is the main exploration of Gulliver (Wilding, 2014).. In the land of the giants, Gulliver realizes that man is nothing but mere puppets in the hands of government. Everybody was superior to him in the land of giants and everyone there harassed him, starting from an insect to a human. The reason of faith and religion came up when Gulliver visited the land of Laputa. As the background of the novel was set up in the seventeenth to eighteenth century had some characteristic trait of that particular period. Humans rejected the Christian beliefs and denied to follow it blindly. In the land of Laputa Gulliver encountered the domination of man. The rational thinking and the scientific innovation led man to think in this manner. In the land of the Yahoos Gulliver encountered his animal instinct. He started hating human because of their lack of reasoning power (Williams, 2013). .
Gulliver encountered the weakness of men through his journey. He realized the ambition in his life and the greed that he had in himself. He realized the pitfalls in his own characters and the present situations of the government in which he was living. Gulliver finally denied the religious beliefs and believed in the power of reasoning.
References
Mackie, E. (2014). Gulliver and the Houyhnhnm Good Life. The Eighteenth Century, 55(1), 109-115.
Ross, I. C. (2013). Gulliver’s Travels.
Wilding, M. (2014). The Politics of Gulliver’s Travels. Sydney Studies in Society and Culture, 8.
Williams, H. (2013). The text of Gulliver’s travels. Cambridge University Press.
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