Book Report on Gulliver's Travels
Gulliver’s Travels is very famous for its satire. The book begins with a short preamble in which Gulliver, in the style of books of the time, gives a brief outline of his life and history prior to his voyages. He enjoys travelling. On his first voyage, Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck and awakes to find himself a prisoner of a race of people one-twelfth the size of normal human beings, who are inhabitants of the neighboring and rival countries of Lilliput and Blefuscu. After giving assurances of his good behavior, he is given a residence in Lilliput and becomes a favorite of the court. From there, the book follows Gulliver's observations on the Court of Lilliput, which is intended to satirize the court of George I. Gulliver assists the Lilliputians to subdue their neighbors the Blefuscudians. However, he refuses to reduce the country to a province of Lilliput, displeasing the King and the court. Gulliver is charged with treason and sentenced to be blinded. With the assistance of a kind friend, Gulliver escapes to Blefuscu, where he spots and retrieves an abandoned boat and sails out to be rescued by a passing ship which takes him back home. The feuding between the Lilliputians and the Blefuscudians is meant to represent the feuding countries of England and France, but the reason for the war is meant to satirize the feud between Catholics and Protestants, over issues that Swift may have found trivial.When the sea vessel Adventure, which was an old wooden ship, is steered off course by storms and forced to go in to land for want of fresh water, Gulliver is abandoned by his companions and found by a farmer who is 60 feet tall. He brings Gulliver home and his extremely smart and strong daughter cares for Gulliver. The farmer treats him as a curiosity and exhibits him for money. The word gets out and the Queen of Brobdingnag wants to see the show. She loves Gulliver and he is then bought by her and kept as a favorite at court.
Since Gulliver is too small to use their huge chairs, beds, knives and forks, the queen commissions a small house to be built for Gulliver so that he can be carried around in it. This box is referred to as his traveling box. In between small adventures such as fighting giant wasps and being carried to the roof by a monkey, he discusses the state of Europe with the King, who is not impressed. On a trip to the seaside, his "traveling box" is seized by a giant eagle which drops Gulliver and his box right into the sea where he is picked up by some sailors, who return him to England.
After Gulliver's ship is attacked by pirates, he is marooned near a desolate rocky island, near India. Fortunately he is rescued by the flying island of Laputa, a kingdom devoted to the arts of music and mathematics but utterly unable to use these for practical ends. The device described simply as The Engine is possibly the first literary description in history of something resembling a computer. Laputa's method of throwing rocks at rebellious surface cities also seems the first time that aerial bombardment was conceived as a method of warfare. Gulliver is then taken to Balnibarbi to await a Dutch trader who can take him on to Japan. While there, he tours the country as the guest of a low-ranking courtier and sees the ruin brought about by blind pursuit of science without practical results in a satire on the Royal Society and its experiments. He travels to a magician's dwelling and discusses history with the ghosts of historical figures, the most obvious restatement of the "ancients versus moderns" theme in the book. He also encounters the struldbrugs, unfortunates who are immortal and very, very old. The trip is otherwise reasonably free of incident and Gulliver returns home, determined to stay there for the rest of his days.
Despite his earlier intention of remaining at home, Gulliver returns to sea as a captain. On this voyage he is forced to find new additions to his crew who he believes to have turned the rest of the crew against him. His crew then mutiny and after keeping him contained for some time resolve to leave him on the first piece of land they come across and continue on as pirates. He is abandoned in a landing boat and comes first upon a race of hideous deformed creatures to which he conceives a violent antipathy. Shortly thereafter he meets a horse and comes to understand that the horses are the rulers and the deformed creatures ("Yahoos") are human beings in their basest form. Gulliver becomes a member of the horse's household, and comes to both admire and emulate the Houyhnhnms and their lifestyle, rejecting humans as merely Yahoos endowed with some semblance of reason which they only use to exacerbate and add to the vices Nature gave them. However, an Assembly of the Houyhnhnms rules that Gulliver, a Yahoo with some semblance of reason, is a danger to their civilization and he is expelled. He is then rescued, against his will, by a Portuguese ship, and is surprised to see that the captain, a Yahoo, is a wise, courteous and generous person. He returns to his home in England. However, he is unable to reconcile himself to living among Yahoos; he becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, largely avoiding his family and his wife, and spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables.
Through the voyages of our protagonist, Lemuel Gulliver, we know some special countries, Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, Japan and the Country of the Houyhnhnms. Every country has its own characteristic and the Country of the Houyhnhnms is the most impressive for me.
From Gulliver’s eyes, we see a perfect society, which reminds me of Plato’s the Republic. In Plato’s works, Plato tells us his imaginational country where everything is perfect. The country of Houyhnhnms may be Jonathan Swift’s imaginational country to some degree. In this country we can live a happy life without wars, conflicts, cheat, etc. I believe that if having the opportunity everyone wants to live in this country, even though they know that that kind of country is impossible. Maybe someone will say that I am a pessimistic person. But I have to say if you want this country the first thing you need to do is to destroy human beings. As a member of human beings, I know that everyone more or less have some selfishness. It is a fact. Human beings have great desires and these desires are the reason why our society can be developed to this degree. Desires are the motivation of human beings’ development. We have to admit that we never can see a society like that.
In that county they have no money. Although the money is the origin of all evils we cannot live without it. If a society has no money we will lose a lot. We do our business and exchange with money. Without money we only can exchange in goods. It is so inconvenient. The business of our society will be very bad. Then when you go to do shopping, you will find that you cannot have enough goods for your life. Money will appear inevitably when our society is developed to some degree. From that we can further know that kind of country cannot appear.
Although we find that Houyhnhnms are very perfect. They are wise, courteous and generous, but we also can find that they have their own weakness. They regard Gulliver as a Yahoo with some semblance of reason and think he is a danger to their civilization and he needs to be expelled. From that we can see the similarity between human beings and Houyhnhnms. When we, human beings, find that something may be dangerous to us, we will try our best to destroy them even though they do not really do harm to us. We will ignore that they have their rights to exist in this world. We can see that Houyhnhnms are cruel to some degree like human beings.
There are not really perfect things existing in the world. They only can exist in our imagination.
:loveliness:I'm sure it's good except for the fact that you didn't write it yourself.
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