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.”
Character Analysis
Gulliver is a practical man in impossible circumstances — and his practicality is the joke. He is professionally neutral, empirically reliable, and constitutionally unable to understand what he is observing. He can describe the Lilliputians' wars with perfect accuracy without grasping their absurdity. He can hear the Brobdingnagian King call his civilization vermin and respond by offering gunpowder. He is not stupid — he is incurious, which is worse. His transformation in Part IV — from unruffled observer to broken misanthrope — is the only genuine change in the novel, and Swift refuses to tell us whether it represents wisdom or madness.
Correct, formal, professional — the language of a credentialed practical man. Never elevated, never vulgar. Reports everything in the same register regardless of content.