Gullivers Reisen (Gulliver's Travels)

Author: Jonathan Swift
Original Title: Gulliver's Travels, or: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships,
Genre: Adventure, Fantasy, Satire

Original publisher: Benjamin Motte
Date first published: 28. October 1726
Date first read: 1993/1994

Main character(s): Lemuel Gulliver (a doctor and traveler, among other things), the Lilliputians (a tiny people), the giants of Brobdingnag, and the inhabitants of Laputa (a flying island, whose people are devoted to various arts and sciences), Balnibarbi (a kingdom ruled by Laputa), Luggnagg (a land whose inhabitants are immortal), Glubbdubdrib (a land where ghosts of famous people live), Houyhnhnms (a race of talking horses), and Japan
Favorite quote: N/A

Synopsis: *SPOILERS*
The book is divided into four parts, which is meant to represent four adventurous voyages of Lemuel Gulliver. Having grown up in England and studied medicine in The Netherlands, Gulliver decided to travel the world in his younger years. During one such trip, he winds up shipwrecked and lands on the shores of Lilliput, an island nation where the people are tiny. Initially afraid of him due to his size, they change their minds when they realize they can defeat their 'hated' neighbors from Blefuscu. While he does help them destroy Blefuscu's fleet, he refuses to completely destroy their city, so the Lilliputians charge him with treason. Luckily he escapes with the help of a friend from the Lilliputian court to Blefuscu, where he finds a boat with which he flees the island.

Not long after, Gulliver sets out again on a new adventure (literally, as the ship's name is The Adventure), but during a storm gets blown off course and winds up in Brobdingnag, a land where things are gigantic, including its inhabitants. A local farmer finds Gulliver and takes him home. The 'tiny' man soon becomes a sensation in Brobdingnag, and the Queen takes him in at court, together with the farmer's daughter Glumdalclitch who becomes his caretaker. She also makes him a 'traveling box', a house made to fit his size, so that he can easily be carried around. Unfortunately, one of the country's giant eagles seizes the box one day, dropping it far off into the sea, where he is eventually fished out by sailors who return him home.

Gulliver's next adventure is not long in coming, and it is the most turbulent. After his ship is attacked by pirates, he is rescued from being marooned on an island by the flying kingdom of Laputa, where people study sciences, but find no practical purpose for it. He also visits Glubbdubdrib, a nearby island to one of the outposts of Laputa's kingdom found on the ground, where he has conversations of ghosts of famous historical figures, and the island of Luggnagg, where whose people are immortal, before finally getting to Japan from where he travels home.

Although determined to stay home after his last adventure, Gulliver nevertheless embarks on another voyage, having been bored of his job as a doctor. This time it is not nature but mankind that makes him stranded in strange lands, namely his crew which mutinies and leaves him behind on the island of the Houyhnhnms, a race of talking horses. The island is also populated with Yahoos, human-like creatures that only have the semblance of reason, whom Gulliver eventually realizes are not different from general society back home in a sense. When the Houyhnhnms decide that Gulliver can't stay with them, he returns home, but feeling that the rest of society is full of Yahoos, he becomes a recluse avoiding other people, including his family.

Review:
Gulliver's Travels was one of Swift's most famous works and is an English literature classic. Swift intended the book as a satire and critique of 'modern' society. The experiences Gulliver has in Laputa, for example, are a critique of the Royal Society of Sciences, whom Swift saw as producing no useable knowledge. Similarly, the constant shipwrecks Gulliver endures are a direct opposition to Dafoe and his work Robinson Crusoe, whose major theme is human resilience. The ending, Gulliver's separation from society is a contrast to the Hobbesian view that individuals are more important to society than the other way around. All in all, the entire book is one criticism after another, which was apparently Swift's aim generally in his works. But whatever he intended, what I got, having reading it at a young age, was the adventure. It was probably one of the many influences that would get me interested in adventure novels in the future.