About a quarter of the way through Swift’s, Gulliver’s Travels, I realized I DON’T LIKE GULLIVER. I don’t like his arrogance, I don’t like his family values, I don’t like his personality and I especially don’t like the way he writes. Gulliver went to school for medicine and was employed on ships traveling to various places around the globe. He just so happened to end up either shipwrecked, ambushed and whatnot to find himself on these mysterious islands apart from his fellow shipmates. He isn’t a writer, he’s a doctor and therefore does not know how to WRITE about his travels very well.
For instance, his first island was Lilliput, where the people were six inches tall. He went on and on about how big he was, how many supplies it took to feed him, house him, etc. On and on and on. He did have some unique experiences there since their culture was similar to the English (royalty, laws, etc.), but he didn’t keep my interest in describing any occurrences. It was more a dry account of the Lilliputians lives. Bor-ing. When he landed in Brobdingnag he was small and they were giants. Again he went on and on and on about the size differences. He described each item in a room, each bug on the ground and practically everything he encountered. Soooo repetitive. Thus far in the novel I was bored with Gulliver’s accounts and lack of personality and hoping it would get better.
The strangeness of his next tours and shipwrecks were in fact interesting, but still poorly described by Gulliver. He kept writing about how much of his story he was leaving out about because he didn’t want to bore the reader with ship traveling details. HA!
The last country he stayed in was the home of intelligent horses called the Houynhnms. They are the equivalent species of their country as human are to our countries (the dominant species). The Yahoos were a race of unrefined “humans” who were more like savage animals than rational beings. Gulliver stayed there for 5 years and ended up loving the horses and detesting the Yahoos. This is where I really started to disliked his personality. He was so overcome with the Houynhunm race that when he returned to England he wouldn’t even let his wife sit at the dinner table with him. He was discussed with her smell, her look and their children. He would literally get sick if near other humans and lived out his life thinking he was superior to these human Yahoos and detested anything they did or said. He resented and hated mankind.
He missed all the lessons he learned over his travels. Every country and their peoples have unique traditions, circumstances and values. It is important as a traveler to understand these differences and see and appreciate the history and reasoning behind the culture. Gulliver did that with every country he visited, but not with his home of England. He ended up hating his life instead of finding things to appreciate in it. On a family note, Gulliver would sail away on a trip, be gone for 3-5 years, have his adventure and make it back home to his family only to stay there for 3-6 months before leaving again. He said 6 months with his wife and children was long enough and his craving for travel overpowered any desire for home. He shouldn’t have married in the first place then. It irritated me that he even started a family and I felt so sorry for them.
Overall, I was disappointed. I was hoping it would be an adventurous book I could read to my children someday, but there is no way I could bore them with this book. In this case I think I’d just encourage them to watch the movie instead. OMG – I can’t believe I suggested that! Oh well. I hope Devon has a better experience than I did.
~Kelly
501 Must-Read Books...An attempt to read some of the greatest books written.
