Gulliver’s Travels, originally published in 1727, is in the public domain. Using the Android Kindle app on my phone, I read the AmazonClassics ebook shown above, which I downloaded during the Covid lockdowns when Amazon made a bunch of classic ebooks available to download for free. However, this Amazon ebook does not include the illustration in Part 3, Chapter 5 of the automatic writing machine, which features in another blog post of mine. I therefore recommend the Standard Ebooks version of Gulliver’s Travels, which does include this illustration, and which, moreover, is free. (Standard Ebooks offers a growing selection of Gutenberg ebooks that have been noticeably improved in terms of proofreading, typesetting, cover design, etc. All free.)
Where does Gulliver go? Are his travels funny? What’s Jonathan Swift trying to say, anyway? (Do I even like satire at all?) Does the book resemble the 1939 animated film adaptation? Find the answers to these questions below.
Where does Gulliver go?
Swift’s narrator Gulliver describes his supposedly real but obviously fictitious travels in four parts. (In an age when parts of the world map were still pretty murky, the stories were theoretically if not actually more plausible.)
I’m guessing Part 1 is the best known. In it, Gulliver is shipwrecked on the shore of Lilliput, where, as you likely know, the inhabitants are much smaller than he is and famously tie him down, as shown in the illustration on the cover of the AmazonClassics edition above, as well as many others.
In Part 2, Gulliver is abandoned by his shipmates on the shore of Brobdingnag, where the inhabitants are much larger, and he is kept as a kind of pet in a portable box like a dollhouse.
Part 3 is more complicated. Gulliver’s ship is attacked by pirates and he is forced to row alone to a desert island. He is rescued by inhabitants of Laputa, a floating island where people only care about mathematics and music, to the detriment of more practical matters. Balnibarbi is Laputa’s earthbound mainland, where Gulliver visits artists and professors engaged in nonsensical projects. The island of Glubbdubdrib is the home of some necromancers, one of whom calls up historical figures so that Gulliver can learn various truths about their historical circumstances. The island of Luggnagg is home to a minority of immortals, who aren’t as useful as Gulliver initially assumes. In Japan, Gulliver pretends to be Dutch, because the Dutch are the only Europeans who are tolerated there; but in any case he soon returns home.
In Part 4, Gulliver’s shipmates mutiny and leave him on the shore of the country of the houyhnhnms, a race of peaceful and enlightened sentient horses who mistake Gulliver for a Yahoo (a degenerate human).
Are Gulliver’s travels funny?
As with all humor, your, uh, mileage may vary.
When Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels, he was making fun of a whole genre, much like Cervantes was when he wrote Don Quixote, and Austen was when she wrote Northanger Abbey. The problem, in every one of these cases, is that I never read the stuff they were making fun of. These works survived, and those didn’t, at least not with the same degree of fame, so a lot of the humor is going right over my head.
Except the humor that’s beneath me. Yeah. I don’t know what I was expecting when I started reading Gulliver’s Travels, but it wasn’t poop jokes. When Gulliver accidentally visits Lilliput and Brobdingnag, he has to explain how, in a place where he’s huge, and a place where he’s tiny, he awkwardly manages to answer the call of nature. There are also absurd sexual innuendos in those parts of the book too.
There’s one bit of humor I absolutely love, though:
Finding it was likely to overblow, we took in our spritsail, and stood by to hand the foresail; but making foul weather, we looked the guns were all fast, and handed the mizzen. The ship lay very broad off, so we thought it better spooning before the sea, than trying or hulling. We reefed the foresail and set him, and hauled aft the fore-sheet; the helm was hard a-weather. The ship wore bravely. We belayed the fore down-haul; but the sail was split, and we hauled down the yard, and got the sail into the ship, and unbound all the things clear of it. It was a very fierce storm; the sea broke strange and dangerous. We hauled off upon the laniard of the whip-staff, and helped the man at the helm. We would not get down our topmast, but let all stand, because she scudded before the sea very well, and we knew that the topmast being aloft, the ship was the wholesomer, and made better way through the sea, seeing we had sea-room. When the storm was over, we set foresail and mainsail, and brought the ship to. Then we set the mizzen, main-top-sail, and the foretop-sail. Our course was east-north-east, the wind was at southwest. We got the starboard tacks aboard, we cast off our weather-braces and lifts; we set in the lee-braces, and hauled forward by the weather-bowlings, and hauled them tight, and belayed them, and hauled over the mizzen tack to windward, and kept her full and by as near as she would lie.
Since the workings of sailing ships are very much not a hobby of mine, I can’t make heads or tails out of all that. If I see nautical stuff in a book, my brain just does a bit of smile-and-nod: “Yes, yes, ship stuff, moving on.” But here, because the ship stuff continues for so long, the brain eventually goes… “Hey uhhhhh, this is, you know, kind of getting to be an awful lot of smiling and nodding I’m doing here… Surely there has been more than enough of this nautically flavored text…? What in the actual heck is going on with this ship?!?! Oh—oh, I see! The irrelevance of the jargon is the point. Ah hah. Nice.”
What’s Jonathan Swift trying to say, anyway?
I’m no historian or literary critic, and I haven’t put a lot of thought into it, but here are a few overall impressions, for what it’s worth.
The journeys to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, where Gulliver lives among people much smaller or much larger, convey a valuable lesson in perspective. Can never have too much of that.
Gulliver’s visit to Balnibari is frustrating, like the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Alice in Wonderland. Or, like, all of Alice in Wonderland, maybe. I hate stuff that’s pure senselessness. But maybe the senselessness, in either case, is the point.
Gulliver’s conclusion, after he lives with the houyhnhnms, that human beings are despicable, comes across as excessively cynical. But again, as the Wikipedia article points out, Swift probably wanted to upset us in exactly this way!
In other words, we shouldn’t (mis)take a narrator’s opinions for the author’s any more than we should (mis)take a movie character’s opinions for the actor’s. Anyway, the book is a satire; we can’t necessarily take any of its content at face value.
Do I even like satire at all?
I know that satire is a legit thing, and I have occasionally been amused by something in The Onion. But now that I’m thinking about it, I’m concluding that I don’t like satire as a genre. (I also don’t like magical realism.)
I find satire unintuitive. I guess I have that in common with the truth-telling houyhnhnms, who disdain to say the-thing-which-is-not.
Here’s a useful blog post that defines satire and gives some examples.
Most of the examples in the post are things I know I don’t like:
- Huckleberry Finn? Didn’t like it.
- Alice in Wonderland? Already said I didn’t like it. I think I read it in high school; I retain a confused impression. I may read it again someday; meanwhile, it’s my least favorite Disney movie.
- The Simpsons, Dr. Strangelove, Slaughterhouse Five… all things I’ve watched or read and don’t like, and quite possibly don’t understand.
Also Candide, which I’ve read and failed to understand… twice.
Exaggeration seems to be a core component of satire. In general, I don’t like exaggeration as a form of humor.
For example, leaving aside the politics and opinions of creator Scott Adams, I noticed some time ago that I typically like the comic Dilbert when it has a pun or self-reference joke, but not when it tells a relatable whiny office-related anecdote but stretches it out of all proportion to actual reality. It doesn’t seem to require much creativity to do that. (The Pointy-Haired Boss is being super mean again? What a surprise.) Thus, it doesn’t really cause any kind of aha feeling the way I think good humor does. That being said, the greatest Dilbert comic of all time, the one about the eargarette, is arguably satire… and also creative.
Does the book resemble the 1939 animated film adaptation?
No.
(Does any movie resemble the book it was based on? I mean, okay, there are a few, but in general, no.)
I watched Gulliver’s Travels (1939) in late 2022. I must have seen it years before; I didn’t remember the plot, but the songs sounded familiar!
The plot of the movie is a happy Hollywood fairy tale. After Gulliver washes up in Lilliput, the Lilliputians tie him down and become frightened when he breaks free; however, as they soon learn, he has no intention of harming them, so they welcome and entertain him. Meanwhile, the king of Lilliput and the king of Blefuscu, the neighboring island, have agreed that their son and daughter will marry, but soon quarrel over which country’s song will be featured in the wedding. Their disagreement sparks a ridiculous war, which Gulliver stops in part by capturing the invading warships of Blefuscu. The prince and princess, who love each other, harmoniously combine their countries’ songs into one, and all’s well.
In contrast, Part I of the original Gulliver’s Travels is a straightforward chronological narration of his arrival and the events that follow. There is indeed a conflict with the neighboring island of Blefuscu, and Gulliver does capture their warships, but there is no love story, and there is nearly as much conflict between Gulliver and the Lilliputians as there is between the Lilliputians and the Blefuscudians. Moreover, there are factions among the Lilliputians! After the faction unfriendly to Gulliver gets the upper hand, a warning from a friend enables him to avoid being impeached and punished for no less than four well-meaning “traitorous” acts. He slips away to Blefuscu and thence sails home, sadder and wiser in the ways of the world.
When and Why I Read Gulliver's Travels
I know a little about Gulliver's Travels by cultural osmosis, but that's not the same as having actually read it! I know that Lilliputian means 'diminutive' because Lilliput is a place full of small people who famously tie Gulliver down (and that brobdingnagian means 'huge' because Brobdingnag is a place full of huge people). I've heard of houyhnhnms, and about some kind of mechanical word machine that people use for writing. It's time to fill in the gaps.
Genre: English literature / satire
Date started / date finished: 10-Mar-25 to 17-Mar-25
Length: 306 pages
ISBN: B073WW8W3R
Originally published in: 1726/2017
Amazon link: Gulliver's Travels
