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.

Gulliver's Choice

I strongly disagree with Gulliver's choice of living with the Houyhnhnms and leaving his own people. He has abandoned his own species due to the minor flaws they exhibit. What do you guys think of this atrocity?

Last thoughts?

I personally found Gulliver's Travels quite enjoyable. It's probably the best book I have read this year for communications. Swift does a great job in keeping the readers entertained, with all his jokes (love the bathroom joke especially.) It was also quite interesting to see how much information that I learned from AP European History came up in this book. Every couple chapters, I could find an allusion to some historical person or event that we learned in Euro. The reason I choose this book was because Japan was mentioned in on of the chapter names (interested in Japan.) But thanks to that, I was able to read such a great book. If I gave it a rating on a scale of 1 to 10, I would give it a 9 out of 10.

AP Lit Prompt Again

1995. Writers often highlight the values of a culture or a society by using characters who are alienated from that culture or society because of gender, race, class, or creed. Choose a novel or a play in which such a character plays a significant role and show how that character's alienation reveals the surrounding society's assumptions or moral values.

After a great shipwreck that caused Gulliver to wash ashore on Lilliput, he is brought into the capital city. Gulliver noticed that these Lilliputians are very small compared to him. In the beginning of his capture, he makes it seem that he is hungry, seeing what the Lilliputians would do. The Lilliputians grabbed him food and wine, making sure he isn't starved. They even climbed his giant body despite their small bodies. The Lilliputians are seen as a race that helps those when needed, they would not let one suffer without a reason. As Gulliver continues to stay with them, he progressively discovers new things. For example, the Lilliputians despise right angles, which is the fundamental basis of all house designs. Instead, the Lilliputians build their houses in very weird shapes because the builders do not build right angles. They also speak oddly, using geometric shapes to describe women, things, and animals. Those are some of the things about the Lilliput's society.

AP Lit Prompt

1991. Many plays and novels use contrasting places to represent opposed forces or ideas that are central to the meaning of the work. Choose a novel or play that contrasts two such places. Write an essay explaining how the places differ, what each place represents, and how their contrast contributes to the meaning of the work.

Gulliver's adventures begins in Lilliput, where the inhabitants are very small in size. Being much taller than the rest of the inhabitants, he is chained and brought into the capital city. But as he continues to learn more and more about the Lilliputians, he starts becoming friends with them. He helps the Lilliputians but defeating the Blefuscu, who started a war against Lilliput. But one another voyage, he stumbles upon the land of giants called Brobdingnag. Here, he is the one, that is smaller than everyone. Even though the people in Brobdingnag are quite larger than he is, they are still friendly. The people here know nothing about politics, not even the king. Between these two places, it is apparent that size of one does not matter. It is just like one of the possible themes within the book, physical power versus moral righteousness, which is one of the central ideas of the book.

A Gruesome Reality

If we, as humans, truly are as greedy and selfish as Gulliver's Houyhuhnm master has made us out to be how much would the world change if we were to begin to change?  What if we had this same sort of Enlightening moment as Gulliver? Is the comparison of humans to Yahoo's accurate? Has it been used to simply add satire to the book? (obviously).

AP Prompt

One of the AP Prompts that I found:

"2009, Form B. Many works of literature deal with political or social issues. Choose a novel or play that focuses on a political or social issue. Then write an essay in which you analyze how the author uses literary elements to explore this issue and explain how the issue contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot."

To quickly summarize, the entire book revolves around the political and social ineptness of humans (specifically the English).  Swift furthers the meaning of this by using his ever famous satire in every one of Gulliver's Travels.  The size and backwardness of the Lilliputians, the gigantic size and the simplicity of the government of the Brobdingnagians, how utterly lost the inhabitants of Laputa are, and the reversal of the expected roles of the Houyhuhnms and the Yahoos.