Satire in Gulivers Travels

Satire in Gulliver's Travels

Satire is a literary genre of Greek origin (satyr), in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule. Although satire is usually meant to be funny, its purpose is often irony or sarcasm, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, religion, and communities themselves, into improvement. In Gulliver's Travels, satire is shown through narration, setting, character, and plot. Jonathan Swift uses utopia and dystopia as elements of setting, and he uses a flat character, miser and tyrant type of character, moral touchstone, and grotesque to illustrate the character element of his satirical novel.
Jonathan Swift has chosen a first-person narrator in his novel of Gulliver's Travels. The narrator is Gulliver who has been plunged into extraordinary and absurd circumstances during his four voyages to a multitude of strange lands around the globe. Although Gulliver's vivid and detailed style of narration makes it obvious that he is intelligent and well educated, his perceptions are naive and gullible. As an example, Gulliver is a naive consumer of the Lilliputians' grandiose imaginings, because he is cowed by their threats of punishment, and their formally worded condemnation of Gulliver on grounds of treason works quite effectively on the naive Gulliver, forgetting that they have no real physical power over him. Gulliver is a round character which is a kind of character who encounters conflict and is changed by it. He changes in relation to the places he visits and the events that befall him as he voyages. As an example, he is the giant in Lilliput and he is worried about trampling on the Lilliputians, while he is at risk of being trampled upon and he is treated as a doll in the land of Brobdingnag. In his last voyage, he develops such a love for the Houyhnhnms society that he no longer desires to return to humankind. And he becomes more and more narrow-minded as the story progresses. On the whole, Gulliver proves