Gulliver's Travels (Version 2)

Gulliver's Travels begins as what seems a straightforward adventure tale and transforms into one of the most vicious satires in the English language. Jonathan Swift's narrator, the earnest ship's surgeon Lemuel Gulliver, whiskers readers away to four impossible lands: a kingdom of tiny people who wage absurd wars over egg-breaking protocols, a nation of giants who find the sight of a naked human disgusting, a floating island of scientists so absorbed in abstract mathematics that they forget to eat, and finally a society of rational horses who keep brutish, human-like creatures called Yahoos in chains. Beneath the wonder and whimsy lies Swift's annihilating contempt for humanity. This is not a children's book dressed up as literature. It is a mirror held up to 18th-century Europe and found wanting, a ruthless examination of pride, folly, and the thin veneer of civilization. Gulliver starts as an observer and ends as a misanthrope who cannot stand the smell of his own family. The comedy is deliberate, the misanthropy genuine, and the unease it produces has not faded in three centuries.