Gulliver's Travels

dghadimi — Wed, 18 May 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Gulliver’s Travels is an outstanding literary masterpiece from one of Ireland’s most celebrated authors, Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels is a novel narrating Gulliver’s travels to various locations. The genre of the novel can be classified as satire due to the political relevance regarding the situation in Ireland towards the end of the 17^thcentury.

Gulliver’s Travels is divided into four large parts. In each section Gulliver travels to a different island and has completely different experiences involving the local inhabitants. When reviewing this novel it is tempting to devote a large section of the essay to a summary of captivating events which unravel in the storyline, however due to the length restrictions one must keep the plot summary concise. The story is orientated around a traveller who goes by the name of Lemuel Gulliver. The opening paragraph of the novel reveals to us Gulliver’s academic past at Cambridge and shows us that he is a clearly intelligent person. Gulliver narrates his travels in a clear and detailed manner. He does not allow his emotions to affect his narration and keeps the descriptions purely factual; the effect of this is that we learn with Gulliver and view events as he would view them. An example of this would be in the fourth part where he arrives upon the land with the horses and is ignorant to the fact that they are governing the land until long after he initially meets them. He does not make connections between the islands he visits and his society back home, which emphasises his use of satire because the comparisons are not too obvious for the reader, for example his experiences involving the inhabitants of Lilliput.

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Gulliver's Travels