“Gulliver’s Travels,” by the early 18th-century Irish author Jonathan Swift, is a book many Americans read in middle school or high school. I only just got around to reading it for the first time, however, so I thought I would write some reactions. Given the book is probably familiar to most of you, I won’t go to great lengths describing its plot in detail here. Instead, I will simply offer some thoughts about its value, and also its limitations, as a work of literature.
I view “Gulliver’s Travels” as primarily accomplishing three interrelated goals. First, it serves as a guide for how to navigate complex social environments one encounters throughout life. Second, it offers a warning not to judge other cultures too quickly. Practices that seem strange to one person are completely ordinary to another, and casting judgment on them is often arbitrary. Third, the novel is a commentary about the limitations of human institutions, especially with respect to our ability to govern ourselves.
With respect to the second two points—pointing out the arbitrariness of cultural practices and the limitations of human institutions—I think these are pretty clearly themes the author intended the book to convey to readers. On the first point—offering a guide for how to navigate life—I’m not as sure that Swift intended this. Yet, interestingly, this was what stuck with me most reading the book.
Gulliver is, quite literally, a foreigner in every strange land he visits. He’s also someone who repeatedly finds himself in precarious situations. At various times he is tied up, imprisoned, humiliated, used as an instrument of foreign policy, employed as cheap entertainment, and discriminated against on the basis of his kind. What is most impressive about Gulliver is that in each of these difficult situations he remains calm and open-minded and shows respect for his hosts (who are also in some cases his captors). This is true even when their actions seem not to merit much good will.
Sometimes Gulliver develops low self-confidence or even a sense of self-hatred, such as when he encounters the impressive Houyhnhnms—speaking horses whose culture at times rivals or even supersedes man’s in terms of enlightenment. Nevertheless, Gulliver doesn’t allow himself to get lost in his self doubts. He is good at asking the right questions and muddling his way through difficult situations by creating alliances and avoiding making enemies.
Gulliver’s character traits are ones each one of us would be wise to emulate throughout life. In my own 41 years on earth, I’ve found myself surrounded by very different people at different moments. When I was a teenager, I was very solitary and spent much of my free time alone. In my early 20s, I hung out with musicians in the Lower East Side music scene in New York City. Eventually, I went to college and studied economics at a commuter school, which was attended by many native New Yorkers and immigrants. In my 30s, I immersed myself in the world of Washington, DC economists and policy analysts. I also spent two years living in Switzerland, one of the most prosperous and also conservative nations in Europe.
These situations aren’t exactly the same as being submitted to bondage by egg-worshiping dwarfs or forced to perform silly parlor tricks for giants. But in a sense what I’ve experienced (and will likely continue to experience) is not that dissimilar from the experiences of Gulliver.
Take, for example, the bizarre tests involving rope dancing that the tiny Lilliputians employ to determine who is worthy of being a government civil servant. This reminded me of the economics profession, where we have to earn pieces of paper in the form of PhDs and publish in peer reviewed journals before gaining acceptance from our colleagues. There is probably some correlation between these activities and being a good economist, but that relationship can be pretty loose.
On the island of Luggnagg, there are people who have achieved immortality called struldbrugs. This sounds great until one realizes that their bodies continue aging and gradually fall apart until they are so decrepit the sight of them is sickening. Here, I couldn’t help but think about the modern movement to promote anti-aging technologies. Have the advocates of these technologies really thought through all the tradeoffs here? Personally, I’m not so sure a world without death would be all that desirable.
Despite keeping an open mind, there are clearly cultural traits that Gulliver disapproves of, and I respected that he’s not afraid to cast judgment once enough of the relevant facts have been collected. For example, Gulliver is clearly skeptical about the impractical experiments that intellectuals perform at the Academy of Projectors in the city of Legado on the flying island of Balnibarbi. Do these people really plan on eating recycled human feces? Surely there must be some better options on the menu, and that’s precisely what Gulliver concludes.
While Gulliver is careful not to judge others from the outset, he reserves the right to cast a critical final vote or even exit altogether if it comes to that. For example, he leaves Lilliput after being ordered by the king to attack its neighbors on the nearby island of Blefescu. His conscience concludes that this would not be the right thing to do, and so he leaves and returns home. Exit is not always an option, but when it is it, we should seriously consider it if a situation deviates too far from the center of our moral compass.
As far as literary style, “Gulliver’s Travels” fits within the tradition of a number of other utopian stories. One such story is Thomas More’s “Utopia,” a 16th-century work of fiction that also describes an imaginary island with cultural practices very different from our own. More’s book includes real people, including More himself, as characters. In that sense “Utopia” can almost be seen as historical fiction, whereas “Gulliver’s Travels” places more emphasis on the magical and might be better classified as “dystopian,” since most of the societies Gulliver visits have substantial flaws. Other works in the utopian tradition include “New Atlantis” by Francis Bacon, and the Romantic poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (which at various points describes an experimental society known as a pantisocracy).
My one criticism of “Gulliver’s Travels” is I found the writing a bit difficult to wade through. I say this not because I think Swift is a bad writer as much as because the book was published almost 300 years ago and it reads like it. At times I found myself struggling to continue reading, given the uppity, colonial-era style of the prose. Much like “Gulliver’s Travels” in some ways feels like a retelling of More’s “Utopia” from 200 years earlier, I found myself wondering if it isn’t time someone took a shot at retelling “Gulliver’s Travels” in more modern parlance.
Some might view “Gulliver’s Travels” as a cynical work that sees human institutions as irreparably flawed. I had a more optimistic take. It’s a guide for how to deal with people who are different from us and whom we will inevitably encounter throughout life. We don’t need to accept everything about other people—some we meet will be downright unpleasant. But we need to keep an open mind. The path to self-discovery requires collecting valuable knowledge from all sorts of unusual people. That means putting ourselves in situations that at times take us outside our comfort zone. Gulliver offers us a good example for how to deal with these difficult but inescapable situations.