Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: Radical Thoughts Hidden Behind Mind-numbing Dialogue

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When I delved into “Gulliver’s Travels”, it was with excitement of rediscovering childhood. I expected a more detailed version of the children’s book where a traveller discovers tiny people. Boy, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Of course, he does discover the Lilliputians but its probably just 1/4th of the book. 

The entire book is split into about four different voyages taken by Gulliver, a man who is slightly estranged in thoughts. ;) However, our children’s books failed to communicate this personality trait in him. In each voyage Gulliver finds himself stranded on a distant land with no ship or crew to the rescue. The land of Lilliput is his first voyage, but it doesn’t stop there. 

There are other intriguing organisms or rather species that he meets in these voyages including a race of horses (Houyhnhnms) and a flying island! The sailor spends many years in each of these lands, learns their language, culture and more importantly provides new perspectives on human civilization. At multiple points he instills in the reader a new lens to look at the world and the then modern society. 

What was most surprising for me was how the author has packed the novel with radical political thoughts, particularly about the English colonialism terrorizing the world at the time. These thoughts and ideas appear towards the book’s end and it's a wonder that the man was not imprisoned or worse executed during the time. 

On other hand, to reach this point the reader has to surpass the painstaking, for want of a better word, Gulliver’s endless rambling. He is extremely descriptive and at multiple points you might lose your train of thought. Secondly, I also found Gulliver to be extremely submissive and a sycophant, a man ready to take anyone for a master. This also seemed somewhat adverse to the general imposition of the then Englishman, who preferred to rule rather than be ruled. 

Overall, the book was an enlightening but a read that requires a lot of determination from the reader’s end. If you ever want to test your determination, please go ahead and pick the book, pun intended. ;) But all jokes apart, the book has a lot of in between the lines ideas packed and includes many ideas which were very much ahead of its time.