A Slight Confusion

Throughout all of his travels, Gulliver manages to learn the languages of the inhabitants he meets. This is a bit confusing because Gulliver eventually meets a land full of intelligent horses, but I would find it hard for a person to even try to understand and learn gestures from horses! With all the different and bizarre cultures Gulliver encounters, Gullivers is doing quite well with adapting to these lifestyles.

The Ultimate belief

Gulliver has had many encounters with civilizations of strange culture. One of his strangest encounters was with the Houyhnhnms,  a breed of intelligent horses. Despite the absurdity in this travel, Gulliver actually develops a whole new perception of mankind; he thinks that humans are all savage and greedy beasts! This revelation completely transforms Gulliver in a way that he now believes that his own species has been feeding him lies and corrupting his mind with false notions of government and patriotic nationalism to his barbaric country.

Horses above Humans?

When Gulliver arrives at the Land of the Houyhnhnms, things start to become very strange. First, Gulliver encounters these beasts (Yahoos) that try and kill him, yet the inhabitants that come and save him are intelligent horses! Later, Gulliver tells the Houyhnhnms that the Yahoos are the dominant race where he comes from which suggests that the Yahoos are human-like. The Houyhnhnm-horses tell Gulliver that they are far more superior to the Yahoos and the Yahoos are like slave-animals. This scenario kind of reminds me of Planet of the Apes where the primates become stronger, both physically and mentally than the humans. It is as if society had reversed on this island where animals are the sophisticated "humans" and the humans are "animals."

Possible Theme For Gulliver's Travels

Physical power or moral righteousness is a theme found in Gulliver's Travels. Gulliver has the upper hand in physical power as he is considered a giant in Lilliput. Gulliver was able to defeat the Blefuscudian navy due to his immense size. But once he got to Brobdingnag, it was all different. Gulliver is the one being harassed because of his size. Everything in Brobdingnag was larger than him. Besides the physical powers of one, there is also the power based on moral righteousness. The Blefuscu and Lilliput are different, not just a cultural difference, but also in their interpretation of their holy book. Through the differences of their holy books, war sparked. Moral superiority and physical power are both hard to justify to dominate others in the end.

Immortality

The Struldbrugs of Laputa have the very unique opportunity/chance of being immortal.   "that sometimes, though very rarely, a child happened to be born in a family, with a red circular spot in the forehead, directly over the left eyebrow, which was an infallible mark that it should never die" (153).  As Gulliver discovered it is more of a curse than a blessing.  The Struldbrugs were prone to depression, I mean who wouldn't be if you were watching loved ones die around you but you could not die too.  Swift uses satirizes the English culture/views on immortality by implicitly saying that it is better to seize each day than to live for ever depressed.  On each of his travels, Gulliver has learn something from the inhabitants of country which he visits, which he then brings back to compare to similar aspects in England.

Allusions

Just a few of the allusions I've found:
"instructing princes to know their true interest" (138)  Machiavelli's  The Prince??
"Alexander the Great" (145)  not dead by poison??
"Hannibal" (145) something to do with vinegar?
"Caesar and Brutus" (145)

• "that his ancestor Junius, Socrates, Epaminondas, Cato the younger, Sir Thomas More, and himself were perpetually together"  Brutus

"Homer and Aristotle" (146)
"Descartes and Gassendi" (146)
"Roman emperors" (146)
"Heliogabalus" (146)
"Polydore Virgil" (147)  Virgil


Kinda cool seeing stuff from Euro in Swift's work.
(Easy allusions when the dead are summoned by a ?Necromancer?)