Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift (1726)
“A children's adventure story that is actually the most savage political satire in the English language — and the joke is on the reader.”
At a Glance
Lemuel Gulliver, an English ship's surgeon, makes four fantastical voyages: to Lilliput (six-inch people whose politics parody England), to Brobdingnag (giants whose king calls humanity 'the most pernicious race of odious little vermin'), to Laputa and its absurdist academy, and finally to the land of the rational Houyhnhnms (horses), where brutal human-like Yahoos expose mankind's true nature. Gulliver returns home permanently alienated from his own species, unable to stand the smell of his wife and children.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Published 1726 and never out of print. One of the first English novels (depending on how you count), certainly the first great satirical novel in English. Simultaneously a landmark of children's literature (for the adventure) and adult political philosophy (for everything else). It is the book that proves a single text can operate on completely different levels for completely different readers — and that this multiplicity is a design feature, not an accident.
Diction Profile
Formally plain — Swift mimics the documentary prose of real travel narratives. Precise, credential-conscious, systematically factual, relentlessly misleading.
Deliberately low in the narration