It has been said that Dean Jonathan Swift hated humanity but loved the individual. His hatred is highlighted in this caustic political and social satire aimed at the English people, humanity in general and the Whigs in particular. By means of a disarming simplicity of style and careful attention to detail to enhance the effect of the narrative, Swift produced one of the most important pieces of satire in world literature. Swift himself attempted to hide his authorship of the book under the original title: Travels in several remote nations of the world, in four parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon and then a captain of several ships. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayWhen Swift created the character of Lemuel Gulliver as narrator for Gulliver's Travels, he developed a personality with many qualities admired by eighteenth-century audiences and still admired by many readers. Gulliver is a decent person: full of hope, simple, quite direct and full of good will. He is a scientist, an expert doctor and, as any good scientist should, loves details. His literal attitude makes him a keen observer of the world around him. Furthermore, like another famous eighteenth-century novel character – Robinson Crusoe – he is encouragingly resourceful in emergencies. Why, then, would such a seemingly admirable, even heroic, character ultimately become an embittered misanthrope, hating the world and turning against everyone, including people who show him kindness? The answer lies in what Swift intended for his character, and Gulliver was certainly not intended to be heroic. Readers often confuse Gulliver as a character and Swift as the author, but to do so is to miss the point of Gulliver's Travels. The novel is a satire and Gulliver is a mask for Swift the satirist. Indeed, Swift does not share Gulliver's rationalistic and scientific responses to the world or Gulliver's beliefs in the progress and perfectibility of humanity. Swift, in contrast, believed that such values ​​were dangerous and that placing such complete faith in the material world, as the scientist Gulliver did, was madness. Gulliver is a product of his time, and is understood as a character who demonstrates the weakness underlying Enlightenment values: the inability to recognize the power of the irrational. Despite Gulliver's apparent congeniality in the novel's opening chapters, Swift makes it clear that Gulliver has serious shortcomings, including blind spots regarding human nature, including his own. Book 3, the least readable section of Gulliver's Travels, is in some ways the most revealing part of the book. In it Gulliver complains, for example, that the wives of the scientists he is observing run away with the servants. The fact is that Gulliver, himself a scientist, pays little attention to his wife's well-being. In the eleven years covered in Gulliver's travelogue, Swift's narrator spends a total of seven months and ten days with his wife. Gulliver is also caught up in Swift's web of satire in Gulliver's Travels. Satire as a literary form tends to be ironic; the author says one thing but means another. As a result, readers may assume that much of what Gulliver observes as good and much of what he thinks and does are not what Swift thinks. As an eighteenth-century type, Gulliver displays his core values: belief in rationality, in the perfectibility of humanity, in the idea of ​​progress, and in the Lockean philosophy of the human mind as a tabula rasa, or tabula rasa, at the moment of birth, controlled and developed entirely by the different traits andimpressions impressed upon it by the environment. Swift, unlike Gulliver, hated the abstraction that accompanied rational thought; he abhorred the rejection of the past that derived from a rationalistic faith in the new and improved past; and cast strong doubts on humanity's ability to acquire knowledge through reason and logic. The world that Gulliver discovers on his travels is significant in Swift's satire. Lilliputians, averaging no more than six inches tall, display the pettiness and smallness that Swift detected in much of what motivates human institutions such as church and state. It is the small religious problems that lead to constant warfare in Lilliput. The Brobdingnagians continue the satire in Part 2 by exaggerating human grossness through their enlarged size. (Swift divided the human measurements by one-twelfth for the Lilliputians and multiplied by twelve for the Brobdingnagians.) The little people of Part 1 and the giants of Part 2 establish a pattern of contrasts that Swift follows in Part 4 with the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos . The Yahoos, "with their heads and breasts covered with thick hair, some frizzy and some smooth", otherwise naked and running about trees like agile squirrels, represent the animal aspect of humanity when that animality is seen as separate from the rational. The Houyhnhnm, completing the other half of the split, know no lust, pain, or pleasure. Their rational temperaments totally govern the passions they have. The land of the Houyhnhnms is a utopia for Gulliver, and he tells the horse people that his homeland is unfortunately ruled by Yahoo. The reader who takes all this at face value misses much of the satire. What is the land of the Houyhnhnm really like, how much of a utopia is it? Friendship, benevolence, honesty and equality are the main virtues there. Decency and civility guide every action. As a result, each pair of horses mates to produce a foal of each sex; after which they are no longer together. Marriages are required to ensure pleasant color combinations for offspring. For young people, marriage is "one of the necessary actions of a reasonable being". Once the function of marriage is fulfilled, after the race has propagated, the two members of the couple are no closer to each other than anyone else is in the whole country. It is this type of “equality” that Swift satirizes. As a product of the rational attitude, such a value deprives life of its fullness, denies the power of emotion and instinct, subjects everything to logic, reason, intellect and makes life boring and uninteresting, predictable like a scientific experiment. regarding the Houyhnhnms as perfect creatures, Gulliver makes his life in England intolerable: I return to enjoy my speculations in my little garden in Redriff; apply those excellent lessons of virtue which I have learned among the Houyhnhnm; educate my family's Yahoos as docile animals I find them; often contemplate my figure in a mirror, and thus, if possible, over time get used to tolerating the sight of a human creature. When Gulliver deems the rational to be perfect and cannot find a rational man who satisfies his ideal, he concludes with disillusionment that humanity is totally animalistic, like the ugly Yahoos. In addition to being a satire and parody of travel books, Gulliver's Travels is an introductory novel. As Gulliver develops, he changes, but he fails to learn an important life lesson, or he learns it incorrectly. His naive optimism about progress and rationality leads him to bitter disillusionment. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a custom essay It is tragically ironic that,.