Gulliver's Travels
A satirical voyage through strange societies, where scale, reason, pride, and political absurdity expose the weaknesses of human civilization.
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The book
Gulliver's Travels follows Lemuel Gulliver across a sequence of extraordinary journeys, each bringing him into contact with unfamiliar worlds that reflect human society in distorted form. In Lilliput, petty rivalries and ceremonial politics are reduced to miniature absurdity. In Brobdingnag, the human body and human ambition are made grotesquely large. In Laputa and related lands, abstract intellect and impractical theory are pushed to comic extremes. In the land of the Houyhnhnms, rational order stands in severe contrast to the degraded impulses represented by the Yahoos. Across these episodes, Jonathan Swift turns the travel narrative into a sharp instrument of satire, forcing readers to confront vanity, cruelty, self-deception, and the fragile dignity of civilized life.
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Significance
Jonathan Swift’s novel remains one of the defining works of satirical prose in English literature. It moves beyond adventure fiction by using fantasy and exaggeration to critique politics, empire, reason, class, and the human tendency toward self-importance. Its lasting power lies in the way it balances comic invention with deep pessimism about human behavior. Gulliver's Travels continues to matter because it can be read both as a lively imaginative journey and as a devastating moral and political critique of modern society.
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Fragments from this book
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However, upon waking, I found myself much recovered. It was now about eight o’clock at night, and the captain ordered supper immediately, thinking I had already fasted t…
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That he laughed at their folly, and went himself in the boat, ordering his men to take a strong cable along with them. That the weather being calm, he rowed round me sev…
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When I asserted that the _Yahoos_ were the only governing animals in my country, which my master said was altogether past his conception, he desired to know, “whether we…
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A messenger was despatched half a day’s journey before us, to give the king notice of my approach, and to desire, “that his majesty would please to appoint a day and hou…
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The seamen threw me the end of the cord, which I fastened to a hole in the fore-part of the boat, and the other end to a man of war; but I found all my labour to little …
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But this princess, who has an infinite deal of wit and humour, set me gently on my feet upon the scrutoire, and commanded me to give his majesty an account of myself, wh…
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By all which, instead of being discouraged, they are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and despair: that as for h…
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He had therefore begun to think it not unwise in us to cover our bodies, and by that invention conceal many of our deformities from each other, which would else be hardl…
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Content note · this fragment may contain distressing material.
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and, the space being so wide between that and the palace, I could easily view it on every side.
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This favourite is hated by the whole herd, and therefore, to protect himself, keeps always near the person of his leader. He usually continues in office till a worse can…
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Her mother and she contrived to fit up the baby’s cradle for me against night: the cradle was put into a small drawer of a cabinet, and the drawer placed upon a hanging …