Gulliver Travels Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift's satirical narrative, Gulliver's Travels (1726), has retained its popularity with children and adults alike for two and a half centuries for its inventiveness, wit, narrative strength and black humour. The four parts of the narrative describe the adventures of Gulliver, the ship's surgeon, among the Lilliputians, six inches high, the Brobdingnagians, tall as church steeples, the Laputans, the thoroughly impractical philosophers, historians, scientists and mathematicians and finally the Houyhnhnms, noble horses endowed with rationality far beyond the reach of human beings. In all the narratives, Man is shown in contrast with these diverse creations of Swift's imagination and the result shows how vain, contentious, brutal and self-deceiving humans are and how they epitomize each of the seven deadly sins.