Jonathan Swift – Carol's Notebook

Author: Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for Whigs then for Tories), and poet, famous for works like Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, The Drapier’s Letters, The Battle of the Books, and A Tale of a Tub. Swift is probably the foremost prose satirist in the English language and is less well-known for his poetry. Swift published all of his works under pseudonyms — such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M.B. Drapier — or anonymously. He is also known for being a master of two styles of satire; the Horatian and Juvenalian styles.

While I'm sure Gulliver's Travels is a masterpiece and has much to say about human society, politics, racism, what have you, I didn't enjoy it. It was a bit boring and I found myself not really caring what Swift was trying to say. Our narrator is Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon who ends up going on four fantastical journeys. The first Gulliver adventure is the most famous one, in the land of Lilliputians where the people 15.24 centimeters tall. Here Swift highlights the human tendency to consider themselves the most important creatures despite their small size, being unaware of their insignificance in the universe. He also shows their absurd justice system and their obsession with rules. On the next adventure, Gulliver visits the land of Brobdingnag, a land of giants. So, an individual's dominance is a relative concept, as where Gulliver was powerful in Lilliput, here he is vulnerable and almost insignificant. The king and queen treat Gulliver as a kind of toy,...