GULLIVER'S TRAVELS

Gulliver's Travels is a misanthropic anatomy of human nature; a sardonic looking-glass. It asks its
readers to refute it, to deny that it has not adequately characterized human nature and society. Each
of the four books has a different theme, but all are attempts to deflate human pride. Book I, written
between 1721 and 1725, may reflect the concerns of Swift's own day, and of his own life--it may be
a politico-sociological treatise in the form of a satire; a protest against Imperialism and Colonialism;
an attack on the corrupt Whig oligarchy which had displaced the Swift's Tories in London--a
defence of Tory policies, an attack on the Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, and on the expensive
and bloody trade wars which had accompanied the twelve years of Whig government--but it is also,
on a deeper level, a satire on the universal human tendency to abuse political power and authority, to
manipulate others and deceive ourselves. It is at once a folk-myth, a children's story, and a
misanthrope's gift to mankind: in Lilliput, which is, quite literally, a microcosm, the vices and follies
not merely of England but of all mankind are epitomized. Swift points out that when men are six
inches tall, their squabbles seem petty, and their pomp and ceremony ridiculous: he leaves it to us to
take his point.

The satire in Book IV is darker and more savage: as an evaluation of the human condition, it
frightened the wits out of most of the most eminent Victorians, and remains profoundly disturbing
today. It suggests that the aspects of our lives of which we are most proud are merely slightly more
complex versions of the activities which, when they are engaged in by Yahoos, we recognize as
being foul, brutal, and disgusting. In contrasting the Houhbynhynms with the Yahoos, Swift concerns
himself, too, with the dichotomy, inherent in all human beings, between reason and unreason;
between sanity and madness. He implies that though Man is neither a rational intellect nor, wholly, a
passionate beast, neither a Houhynhynm nor a Yahoo, he inclines to the bestial. In this final book
Swift seems to despair: for Gulliver, overwhelmed, as perhaps Swift himself was, by a black,
misanthropic, despairing vision of reality, the only middle ground left between the dreamy utopia, the
ironically "ideal" society of the Houhynhynms, and the abyss of Yahooism seems to be a stable in
England. We cannot identify with the Houhynhynms, but we can identify only too well with the
Yahoos: the closer we look at them the more horrible, because more identifiably human, they
become. Is there a moral to Book IV?