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What You’ll Love about… Gulliver’s Travels Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput by Jonathan Swift
One of the most excellent qualities of Gulliver’s Travels is how real it can seem. The worlds that Swift creates are not just hangers for ideas; they seem lived-in and vibrant. Students sometimes want to believe that the places Gulliver visits are real, because Swift makes an effort to maintain a narrative and to include the kind of specific details that lend an air of verisimilitude. The motivations of all of the beings in the story are delightfully plausible, and Gulliver’s openness and resilience are charming.
At a fundamental level, Gulliver’s Travels is about perspective. Your experiences are colored by how you see yourself in relation to others and the world around you. Swift extends perspective beyond its natural limits to defamiliarize it and encourage his audience to question their beliefs and assumptions about what is natural, rational, and customary. Swift probes the relationship between perspective and human existence in various ways, first by manipulating Gulliver’s relative size, and then by inverting the typical relationship between humans and animals. In Part I, Gulliver finds himself in Lilliput, where he is about twelve times larger than everyone else.
The text’s explanations about the exact mechanics involved in Gulliver’s size difference may not…
