Analysis of Gulliver's Travels
Analysis of Gulliver's Travels
The narrator and protagonist of the story, Lemuel Gulliver is an English ship's surgeon carried by circumstance into a series of adventures in strange parts of the world. He is well-traveled and speaks several languages. He grew up in Nottinghamshire, the third of five sons in a respectable, middle-class family. While in school he held jobs: as an apprentice, he proved his competence; as a physician, he was able to get work on ships, which had been his lifelong dream. Before Gulliver leaves for Lilliput it can be said that he's reasonably intelligent, hard working, disciplined, alert, and curious. As a traveler in Lilliput he's careful in his observations, and complete in his descriptions.
Gulliver’s character gets tampered with as he travels from one island to the next. He's not steady; he changes in relation to the places he visits and the events that befall him as he voyages. In Lilliput he seems to be eminently fair-minded compared to the cunning, vindictive, petty Lilliputians. Literally a giant in their land, Gulliver never takes unfair advantage of his size in his dealing with them. Though they're violent with him, he never retaliates in any way.
In Brobdingnag, land of the giants, Gulliver appears Lilliputian in more ways than one. But his size is a dire problem to him here. He is frequently injured, the king's dwarf takes out his frustrations on tiny Gulliver, but the latter is an improvement for Gulliver- before coming to court, his master hired him out as a freak at village fairs. Gulliver can't keep it together under the strain of repeated attacks on his ego, and in his dealings with the Brobdingnagian king, Gulliver appears as nasty and cruel as the Lilliputians themselves.
As Gulliver voyages, and we voyage with him, his viewpoint changes according to the place in which he finds himself and the things that happen to him there. In part one Gulliver is solid, decent, and responsible while in part two he represents a man who under repeated attacks on his ego and self-image succumbs to pettiness.