The Satiric Vision in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels [Archives:2003/647/Education]

By Gaafar Sulaiman Elwagie
M.A. (University of Applied and Social Sciences, Sana'a
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is a great English satirist of the 18th century. Besides his masterpiece Gulliver's Travels, his other works include A Tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Book and A Modest Proposal.
The word 'satire' implies the use of humour, irony, exaggeration or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other issues.' In fact, there are two modes of satire. The first kind is humorous. It works by provoking laughter, and may be called 'comic satire'. The second mode is a severely scathing attack in which laughter is at a minimum. It is marked by the predominance of caustic or corrosive satire. Swift is a writer of corrosive satire, but still he makes use of comic satire as an instrument of correction of follies and foibles in several of his writings.
Gulliver's Travel's is a severe attack on human pride, pretensions, cruelty and vanities. Although the satire is targeted at the modes and morals, of men in the eighteenth century; little has changed since then. Still man has the same vice and follies. As such, Swift's attack on the crying abuses of the then society is valid even today.
Besides the satire, the book is a parody of travel literature. It is also a comic masterpiece and a child-like tale. The satire on man and his civilization has been effected from four anglepoints: physical, political, moral and intellectual. The novel consists of four parts or voyages which show Gulliver's adventures first among tiny people and then among giants, followed by that among idealists and dreamers, and finally among horses.
In the first voyage to Lilliput we read about dwarfs who used fifteen hundred horses to draw Gulliver to their capital. There are also some amusing activities, like Rope – dancing and leaping over sticks, which are tests of ability and merit for high offices. This is a satire on the way in which political offices were distributed among the candidates by the English king. In the second voyage, Gulliver is among giants and he is a dwarf himself. Here there is a direct attack on mankind generally. The king describes them as odious and harmful insects.
The third voyage is to Laputa, the flying island, where the philosophers, projectors and inventors are dreamers and plan impracticable methods. Here the satire is on the researches and experiments of the Royal Society of England .The final voyage is to the land of the Houyhhnms and the Yahoos, that is the horses and human beings. Here horses are reasonable, while human beings are mentally inferior to horses.
To conclude, one can say that Gulliver's Travels is a comprehensive attack on human vices everywhere, the hypocrisy of courts, statesmen, political and religious parties, which merits its serious study. All this is an unmistakable sign of Swift's greatness as one of the leading authors and prominent moral satirists of all time.
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