Gulliver's Travels (Penguin Classics)
by Jonathan Swift
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jonathan SwiftEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-02-25
ISBN: 0141439491
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780141439495
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Gulliver's Travels (Penguin Classics)
Book Review: A Masterpiece on Many Levels
Summary: 5 Stars
Gulliver's Travels is near-unique in world literature in that it can truly be enjoyed and appreciated by all. It has over the years been seen an adventure, a children's story, a travelogue parody, a political allegory, one of the first novels, and a satirical masterpiece. The book is all this and more, making it one of literature's ten or so truly immortal works, a towering monument as significant and important nearly three hundred years on as ever. It is one of the few books that absolutely everyone should read, and its peculiar greatness is that, perhaps alone among them, nearly everyone will love it.
On the most obvious level it is a rollicking adventure. Swift's imagination is one of the most astounding ever; he invents an incredible diversity of unforgettable places and people, and millions have been enthralled by this alone. The book has even often worked as a children's story - sans crude and heavy elements of course. Those approaching it for the first time are in for a real joy. They simply will not know what comes next and will keep wondrously reading to find out.
Those who really appreciate the novel, though, see that Swift was merely using the adventure frame as a vehicle for his philosophical and political views. Often called misanthropic, a deep distrust of humanity affected everything he did; he was sickened by brutality, avarice, pride, and other vices, which comes across clearly here in many ways. Gulliver unflinchingly depicts many of humanity's shortcomings without excuse or even sympathy; our irrationality, stupidity, ignorance, hypocrisy, and perhaps above all, arrogance are on merciless display. The true mockery is often not so much the horror of our actions as the pettiness of our motives. Despite the light-hearted device, a more fundamentally misanthropic and savagely satirical work has perhaps never been written. Anyone wanting shame-inducing proof of what fools human beings are need look no further.
Yet it is possible to take this too far. As misanthropic as Swift was, he was also one of the era's great liberals - a fierce liberty champion and advocate for the repressed. Those who read closely can see that his hatred lay not with the downtrodden but with those who make them so - monarchs, politicians, judges, lawyers, and other unsavory types. He was sickened by humanity's inhumanity. The almost unbearably dark ending seems to have no hope for meliorism, and the book generally shows human life as an unbroken misery series. Stern Christianity kept Swift from the existential despair that haunted writers and intellectuals about a century and a half later, but one would be very hard-pressed to find a more despairing portrait of the human condition prior to the late nineteenth century.
Again, though, this can be exaggerated. Some parts of the novel are truly light-hearted; there is a wealth of humor, not all of it satirical. There is also a great deal of charming whimsy. Most notable of all, though, is that Swift manages to convey his bitter pill through satire; this is worlds away from the gloomy realist works of the last century plus. Swift is universally known as the greatest English satirist and is one of the greatest ever; he knew how to convey harsh truths in palatable form. The satire ranges from thinly-veiled to subtle. Swift thus lets the real message arise naturally rather than overwhelming the story - a fine line that few can walk straight and that perhaps no one can do as well.
The satire's sophistication has been fully recognized only relatively recently; Gulliver was indeed so far ahead of its time that it was perhaps not even possible for all its nuances to have been appreciated earlier. Careful readers will notice that Gulliver, as his name implies, is very gullible - at least at first, often not seeming to see the full import of what he says. However, he becomes ever more cynical and wizened, and the satirical frame gradually lessens to the point where most of part four is simply outright lashing - almost an essay in dramatic monologue form. Some have criticized this on artistic grounds, saying Swift got carried away or even that he began to lose sanity. However, it is clearly deliberate; the artistic control is stunningly precise. Swift knows how to draw us in, introducing his message gradually until we are so taken that we will keep reading even when hit hard. Such finely-wrought mastery has rarely been shown anywhere, much less in satire. This is also important in character development terms; Gulliver is a very complex - perhaps even unreliable - narrator of the type who did not really reappear until the twentieth century. Obvious as Swift's points are, the novel is thus ripe for deconstruction; the book can be interpreted in a near-endless variety of ways with widely different ramifications despite the clear core. This is a large part of the reason for its continuing popularity with critics as well as the public.
Gulliver is a landmark in many other ways, not least in the novel's history. It was published in 1726, only seven years after Robinson Crusoe, which is generally called the first real Western novel. There is even good reason to think Swift began as early as 1720. Robinson is one of the few books even more popular than Gulliver, but the latter is far superior by any standard; it has virtually everything Robinson has plus far more. Novels of its depth and complexity were not normal for nearly another two centuries; that such a work came practically on the first novel's heels is truly incredible. Also highly noteworthy is how Swift manages to keep a realistic tone despite so many fanciful events - a task far harder than Defoe's with Robinson. This is of course part of the joke and also Swift's jab at the highly apocryphal travelogues then immensely popular; Gulliver is indeed in large part a parody of them, yet another interesting angle and one now nearly forgotten.
The book is also of great historical value. The satire in many ways gives a more realistic glimpse into the important Enlightenment era than a realist work, or even a history, could ever hope to do. We get a good idea of the issues that dominated English, Irish, and European politics as well as other important social matters. Perhaps more importantly, we get a stark glimpse of the thoughts and customs that lead to the atrocities Swift condemns - an invaluable lesson from which we clearly still have much to learn.
Last but not least, Gulliver is an English prose watershed. Swift defined good style as "proper words in proper places" - a seemingly simple, even asinine, definition but one that very few have successfully followed. His prose is plain and straight-forward, as Gulliver himself constantly reiterates, but in the best possible way; few works are so clear and concise. Thus, despite archaic spelling and punctuation, the book reads almost as well as ever; even casual readers who have almost no experience with classics, much less ones of this vintage, can pick it up with practically no trouble. Unlike nearly all classics, it need not be drastically edited, footnoted, and introduced for comprehension. This is hardly true of even many twentieth century works, to say nothing of ones nearly three centuries old. Gulliver is a major part of the reason Swift remains a model for anyone wanting unadorned but transcendently lucid English prose.
Surely nothing more need be said. If one could read only five or ten books, this should be among them. Anyone who has not experienced its wonders should do so without delay.
Summary of Gulliver's Travels (Penguin Classics)
Shipwrecked castaway Lemuel Gulliver?s encounters with the petty, diminutive Lilliputians, the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the abstracted scientists of Laputa, the philosophical Houyhnhnms, and the brutish Yahoos give him new, bitter insights into human behavior. Swift?s fantastic and subversive book remains supremely relevant in our own age of distortion, hypocrisy, and irony.
@LittleBigMan Awoke in an unfamiliar land. The boat and my crew are gone. Oh dear, the people here are very small. Oops. Sorry about that.
I don?t mean to boast; I?m not a terribly tall man. But these people of Lilliput are the size of child?s Johnson. Still, they have captured me.
I have become a great favorite of the Lilliputian court, whose antics are like an adorable tiny version King George?s, the blithering idiot.
From Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less
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