Gulliver’s Travel by Swift
Gulliver’s narrative begins much like other travel records of his time. The description of
his youth and education provides background knowledge, establishes Gulliver’s position in
English society, and causes the novel to resemble true-life accounts of travels at sea published
during Swift’s lifetime. Swift imitates the style of a standard travelogue throughout the novel to
heighten the satire. Here he creates a set of expectations in our minds, namely a short-lived belief
in the truth of Gulliver’s observations. Later in the novel, Swift uses the style of the travelogue to
exaggerate the absurdity of the people and places with which Gulliver comes into contact. A
fantastical style—one that made no attempt to seem truthful, accurate, or traditional—would
have weakened the satire by making it irrelevant, but the factual, reportorial style of Gulliver’s
Travels does the opposite.
Gulliver is surprised to discover the Lilliputians but is not particularly shocked. This
encounter is only the first of many in the novel in which we are asked to accept Gulliver’s
extraordinary experiences as merely unusual. Seeing the world through Gulliver’s eyes, we also
adopt, for a moment, Gulliver’s view of the world. But at the same time, we can step back and
recognize that the Lilliputians are nothing but a figment of Swift’s imagination. The distance
between these two stances—the gullible Gulliver and the skeptical reader—is where the
narrative’s multiple levels of meaning are created: on one level, we have a true-life story of
adventure; on another, a purely fictional fairy tale; and on a third level, transcending the first two
and closest to Swift’s original intention, a satirical critique of European pretensions to rationality
and goodwill.
Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels at a time when Europe was the world’s dominant power,
and when England, despite its small size, was rising in power on the basis of its formidable fleet.
England’s growing military and economic power brought it into contact with a wide variety of
new animals, plants, places, and things, but the most significant change wrought by European
expansion was the encounter with previously unknown people—like the inhabitants of the
Americas—with radically different modes of existence. The miniature stature of the Lilliputians
can be interpreted as a physical incarnation of exactly these kinds of cultural differences.
The choice of physical size as the way of manifesting cultural differences has a number
of important consequences. The main consequence is the radical difference in power between
Gulliver and the Lilliputian nation. His physical size and strength put Gulliver in a unique
position within Lilliputian society and give him obligations and capabilities far beyond those of
the people who keep him prisoner. Despite Gulliver’s fear of the Lilliputians’ arrows, there is an
element of condescension in his willingness to be held prisoner by them. The power differential
may represent England’s position with respect to the people it was in the process of colonizing. It
may also be a way for Swift to reveal the importance of might in a society supposedly guided by
right. Finally, it may be a way of destabilizing humanity’s position at the center of the universe
by demonstrating that size, power, and significance are all relative. Although the Lilliputians are
almost pitifully small in Gulliver’s eyes, they are unwilling to see themselves that way; rather,
