resque and fascinating; and he has the natural instinct for narration which gives vigorous movement and climax. Indignation and contempt often make his style burn with passion, and humor, fierce or bitterly mirthful, often enlivens it with startling flashes. "The great range of the satires which make the greater part of Swift's work is supported in part by variety of satiric method. Sometimes he pours out a savage direct attack. Sometimes, in a long ironical statement, he say s exactly the opposite of what he really means to suggest. Sometimes he uses apparently logical reasoning where either, as in 'A Modest Proposal, 'the proposition, or, as in the' Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, 'the arguments are absurd. He often shoots out incidental humorous or satirical shafts "[16]. But his most important and extended method is that of allegory. The pigmy size of the Lilliputians symbolizes the littleness of mankind and their interests; the superior skill in rope-dancing which with them is the ground for political advancement, the political intrigues of real men; and the question whether eggs shall be broken on the big or the little end, which has embroiled Lilliput in a bloody war, both civil and foreign, the trivial causes of European conflicts. In Brobdingnag, on the other hand, the coarseness of mankind is exhibited by the magnifying process. Swift, like Defoe, generally increases the verisimilitude of his fictions and his ironies by careful accuracy in details, which is sometimes arithmetically genuine, sometimes only a hoax. In Lilliput all the dimensions are scientifically computed on a scale one-twelfth as large as that of man; in Brobdingnag, by an exact reversal, everything is twelve times greater than among men. But the long list of technical nautical terms, which seem to make a spirited narrative at the beginning of the second of Gulliver's voyages, is merely an incoherent hodge-podge. p> Swift, then, is the greatest of English satirists and the only one who as a satirist claims large attention in a brief general survey of English literature. He is one of the most powerfully intellectual of all English writers, and the clear force of his work is admirable; but being first a man of affairs and only secondarily a man of letters, he stands only on the outskirts of real literature. In his character the elements were greatly mingled, and in our final judgment of him there must be combined something of disgust, something of admiration, and not a little of sympathy and pity. b>
II. The human being hypostases as presented in "Gulliver's Travels"
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2.1.The protagonist presentation
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Lemuel Gulliver is an unremarkable and unimaginative man from middle-class England. He is morally upright and honest but, as his name suggests, somewhat gullible. As he himself is honest, he naively assumes that everyone else is as honest, and hence believes what he is told. He is an everyman through whose eyes the reader sees and judges the people he encounters. Gulliver, as the name suggests, is someone who is 'gullible'. This gullible traveler has written a travelogue, which consists of four different voyages: Each voyage appears to be entirely different from the other three voyages. This is one of the reasons why Swift has divided the voyages into four parts. Gulliver represents an everyman, a middle-class Englishman who is fundamentally decent and well intentioned. In the course of his travels, he becomes less tolerant and more judgmental of the nations he visits and of his fellow human beings.
"Gulliver is gullible, as his name suggests. For example, he misses the obvious ways in which the Lilliputians exploit him. While he is quite adept at navigational calculations and the humdrum details of seafaring, he is far less able to reflect on himself or his nation in any profoundly critical way "[17]. Traveling to such different countries and returning to England in between each voyage, he seems poised to make some great anthropological speculations about cultural differences around the world, about how societies are similar despite their variations or different despite their similarities. But, frustratingly, Gulliver gives us nothing of the sort. He provides us only with literal facts and narrative events, never with any generalizing or philosophizing. He is a self-hating, self-proclaimed Yahoo at the end, announcing his misanthropy quite loudly, but even this attitude is difficult to accept as the moral of the story. Gulliver is not a figure with whom we identify but, rather, part of the array of personalities and behaviors about which we must make judgments.
Gulliver's function as a measuring stick is metonymic: he comes from the British world - ostensibly the land of the Real - and so the British reader feels he can be used to establish differences between the Rea...
