Gulliver Essay, Research Paper
In Jonathan Swift ’ s, “ Gulliver ’ s Travels, ” The chief character, Gulliver remarks on the nature of adult male and his defect. The characters that Gulliver reacts with reveal the writers stance on many moral and ethical issues. One of these issues is sin. The writer invariably depicts characters as sarcasms upon their existent opposite numbers and frequently concentrating on showing one wickedness in peculiar. The writer in peculiar is highly critical of one ’ s pride, and chooses to show this defect in adult male most frequently. He begins by demoing the absurdness of possessing excessively much pride with illustrations from the Lilliputians. The pride that the emperor takes in his name demonstrates the adrift nature of pride. The emperor is called, “ Golbasto Molmaren Evlame Gurdilo Shefin Mully Ully Gue. ” This is an obvious sarcasm on the long names that many members of the higher rank carried in the seventeenth century to separate themselves. Both the length and the manner of this name mean to demo the mistake in exaggerating the pride in one ’ s name. With equal absurdness, pride is found as the footing for the ill will between the Lilliputians and the Blefescuns. It is wholly based on the pride with which they break their eggs. Although still absurd, this clip the effect of pride has a serious undertone, as it is stated “ that 11,000 individuals have, at several times, suffered decease, instead than subject to interrupt their eggs at the smaller end. ” The authoralthough, non yet in an all at onslaught upon wickedness, is already proposing that those guilty of pride deserve to decease. His philippic of pride Begins in the land of he Houynhnhmns. He state
s his master in the excessiveness and wastefulness of pride. He explains that the incapability with which English females keep their pride is in the tea they consume. He explains that they pride so much of the quality of the tea they drink that they charter merchants to circle the globe “at least three times round, before one of our better female Yahoos could get her breakfast or a cup to put it in. He wonders, “how such vast tracts of ground? should be wholly without fresh water, and the people put to the necessity of sending over the sea for a drink.” The author is pointing out the wastefulness that Pride causes. It induces people to go to extravagant ends to acquire trivial luxuries such as tea and bottled water. The author then assaults the nobility by saying, “in order to feed the luxury and the intemperance of the males and the vanity (pride) of the females, we sent away the greatest part of our necessary things to other countries, from whence in return we brought the materials of diseases, folly, and vice, to spend among ourselves.” The author is at his satiric and sarcastic worst. He asserts the entire nobility is guilty of pride and wasteful and excessive, and in effect should die from those “materials of disease.”The author justifies all these assertions, because they come out of the mouth of his character, Gulliver, who is generally devoid of pride. He walks in Lilliput knowing his breaches to be “in so ill a condition,” and he suffers for a time the humility of being carried around in a box as a spectacle. Truly, Gulliver can tell the fault of pride from his success, and survival in being without pride.
