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motobass4321 's review for:
Gulliver's Travels
by Jonathan Swift
I read this for a Back to the Classics Challenge in the category of an adventure classic. And indeed it is replete with adventures. There are four main adventures with some diversions within the third. Gulliver is said to be an honest if simple reporter of what he sees and experiences. The adventures pair up where Gulliver will be first morally/physically/rationally "larger" and in the next "smaller" in the same capacity than the new civilizations he visits. As is well-known to most who pick up this book, it is a satire. Many things are exposed to ridicule and sharp observations. Mostly the rational capacity of people; the justness of their governments; and the morality of groups and individuals.
Many of the reviewers on this site seemed to find it hard to make it through the book - finding it dry or tedious. I did not have a problem with that. Even not knowing who or what exactly he was skewering did not impede enjoying it. Swift did give us a model of at least one non-ridiculed person in the tale - that of a Portuguese ship captain.
My favorite part was the descriptions of what the academician scientists - "Projectors" - in the third travel were up to. Their projects were incredibly silly - extracting and storing sunlight from cucumbers, for example - and, it turns out, incredibly harmful to the people who were obliged to implement them. Houses built from the top down; doing the work of burying things in fields for the purpose of getting the hogs to "plow" the fields when they went digging them up to eat them; and a scheme to replace spoken language with a bag of things to point at - sometimes multiple bags being required depending on, etc., etc. One of the things heaped with the most derision by Gulliver - and wonderful irony on the part of Swift - was the plan of the Political Projectors:
Noting then that "there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some Philosophers have not maintained for Truth." Not all of the projectors were "so visionary" though and their schemes were not so ill received!
I am very happy to have read this. If one part or section should not prove interesting to you, it is likely another would. It was meant as a remedy for people to be able too see and think differently about the times they lived in - to open them up to the possibility that other plans or procedures may have more wisdom. The "sins" of us Yahoos are listed and spoken plainly and if Gulliver is of middling range in Morals, Intellect, and Physical Prowess or other Abilities, we often have reason to find our current situation no better and often poorer by comparison - more Yahoo-like. Swift's satire is sharp and his irony makes for really enjoyable reading. (Fair warning, he brings up scatological topics regularly.) He is a model for satirists writing today. His writing was also so popular, so much in fashion, that those most targeted by his satire had to read what he wrote.
Many of the reviewers on this site seemed to find it hard to make it through the book - finding it dry or tedious. I did not have a problem with that. Even not knowing who or what exactly he was skewering did not impede enjoying it. Swift did give us a model of at least one non-ridiculed person in the tale - that of a Portuguese ship captain.
My favorite part was the descriptions of what the academician scientists - "Projectors" - in the third travel were up to. Their projects were incredibly silly - extracting and storing sunlight from cucumbers, for example - and, it turns out, incredibly harmful to the people who were obliged to implement them. Houses built from the top down; doing the work of burying things in fields for the purpose of getting the hogs to "plow" the fields when they went digging them up to eat them; and a scheme to replace spoken language with a bag of things to point at - sometimes multiple bags being required depending on, etc., etc. One of the things heaped with the most derision by Gulliver - and wonderful irony on the part of Swift - was the plan of the Political Projectors:
These unhappy People were proposing Schemes for persuading Monarchs to choose Favourites upon the Score of their Wisdom, Capacity and Virtue; of teaching Ministers to consult the Public Good; of rewarding Merit, great Abilities and eminent Services; of instructing Princes to know their own true Interest by placing it on the same Foundation with that of their People; Of choosing for Employments Persons qualified to exercise them; with many other wild impossible Chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of Man to conceive...
Noting then that "there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some Philosophers have not maintained for Truth." Not all of the projectors were "so visionary" though and their schemes were not so ill received!
I am very happy to have read this. If one part or section should not prove interesting to you, it is likely another would. It was meant as a remedy for people to be able too see and think differently about the times they lived in - to open them up to the possibility that other plans or procedures may have more wisdom. The "sins" of us Yahoos are listed and spoken plainly and if Gulliver is of middling range in Morals, Intellect, and Physical Prowess or other Abilities, we often have reason to find our current situation no better and often poorer by comparison - more Yahoo-like. Swift's satire is sharp and his irony makes for really enjoyable reading. (Fair warning, he brings up scatological topics regularly.) He is a model for satirists writing today. His writing was also so popular, so much in fashion, that those most targeted by his satire had to read what he wrote.