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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I was an hour walking to the end of this field, which was fenced in with a hedge of at least one hundred and twenty feet high, and the trees so lofty that I could make n…
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I hired two mules, with a guide, to show me the way, and carry my small baggage. I took leave of my noble protector, who had shown me so much favour, and made me a gener…
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In the mean time, I here conclude the second part of my unfortunate voyages. A VOYAGE TO LAPUTA, BALNIBARBI, GLUBBDUBDRIB, LUGGNAGG AND JAPAN. I had not been at home abo…
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The astonishment here was much greater than at the sight of my scimitar. Hundreds fell down as if they had been struck dead; and even the emperor, although he stood his …
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I soon fell asleep, and all I can conjecture is, while I slept, the page, thinking no danger could happen, went among the rocks to look for birds’ eggs, having before ob…
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said, of one entire adamant, two hundred yards thick, might happen to crack by too great a shock, or burst by approaching too near the fires from the houses below, as th…
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The weather being very warm, the closet-window was left open, as well as the windows and the door of my bigger box, in which I usually lived, because of its largeness an…
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Sometimes a war is entered upon, because the enemy is too strong; and sometimes, because he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbours want the things which we have, or have …
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But I shall here only set down the substance of what passed between us concerning my own country, reducing it in order as well as I can, without any regard to time or ot…
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One day, at dinner, this malicious little cub was so nettled with something I had said to him, that, raising himself upon the frame of her majesty’s chair, he took me up…
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This conversation they are apt to run into with the same temper that boys discover in delighting to hear terrible stories of spirits and hobgoblins, which they greedily …
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In this necessity I was forced to swim behind, and push the boat forward, as often as I could, with one of my hands; and the tide favouring me, I advanced so far that I …