What You’ll Love about… Gulliver’s Travels Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag
In Part II of Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver finds himself in Brobdingnag, where most people are about twelve times his size. Gulliver goes from being a giant to being an insect, and it has a profound effect on him. One of Gulliver’s first impulses is to express concern for the Lilliputians from Part I:
I reflected what a mortification it must prove to me, to appear as inconsiderable in this nation, as one single Lilliputian would be among us. But this I conceived was to be the least of my misfortunes; for, as human creatures are observed to be more savage and cruel in proportion to their bulk, what could I expect but to be a morsel in the mouth of the first among these enormous barbarians that should happen to seize me? Undoubtedly philosophers are in the right, when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison. It might have pleased fortune, to have let the Lilliputians find some nation, where the people were as diminutive with respect to them, as they were to me. And who knows but that even this prodigious race of mortals might be equally overmatched in some distant part of the world, whereof we have yet no discovery.
There’s a good deal to unpack there, and some of Gulliver’s statements are ironic, but Gulliver importantly sympathizes with the Lilliputians to…
