The Moral and Importance of "Gulliver's Travels"
...nth century. Everyone in Lilliput is small and the concerns are also small and petty. The cause of the war between Lilliput and its neighboring island Blefuscu is a difference of opinion about whether the right way to crack an egg is from the big or the small end. Swift gives this ridiculous reason of the war in order to satirize the English politics when the Whigs and Tories were fight intensely for controlling the country. Besides, the society and the political system in Lilliput also represents the British Empire, for instance, the “High-Heels” represents the Tories, and the “Low-Heels” represents the Whigs. In this section, Gulliver is a responsible and decent man, although he is a giant man to the small Lilliputians, he tries his best not to hurt the people. And after being treated well, he feels obligated to protect the country. But the Lilliputians are petty, vindictive and vengeful. In part two of Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver lands in Brobdingnag, a world where everything is twelve times larger than the normal size of things in the real world. In this section, Gulliver is a dwarf. A farmer captures him and later sells him to the Queen. Although the Queen treats him well, he is like a pet or a doll. The king also curious about him and asks him everything about English society, welfare, financial system and justice, Swift uses detailed questions in order to expose the problems the British Empire has. In this part, by using the physical difference, Swift shows Gulliver’s powerlessness, prejudice and narrow-mindedness. The king of the Brobdingnag is a strong ruler; he considers force is a measure of absolute last resort that represents Swift’s idea. In part three, Gulliver goes to the flying island of Laputa. From this part, we can know the early eighteenth-century scientific activities and attitudes. In Laputa, the inhabitants have one eye turned inward and one eye turned upward, this represents they are thinking always of their own speculations and lose contact with the demands of the real life. With this, Swift criticizes the scientific movement of the Enlightenment. He was not opposed to science; he thought science should serve humanity. Then Gulliver goes to the island of Balnibarbi, and the inhabitants engaged in “advanced” scientific research, Swift calls these “a series of perfectly useless, wasteful experiments”. On Gulliver’s fourth journey, he embarks on an unknown land. This land is inhabited by the houyhnhnms who look like horses but are able to speak by Yahoos, brutish human like creatures who are servants to the houyhnhnms. The houyhnhnms have built a society without crime, poverty, disagreement and unhappi...