Tuesday, July 08, 2008

One final comment on Gulliver


The concluding chapter in Gulliver's Travels is an interesting one. He recounts how he left the land of the Houyhnhnms and then recounts he he got home through the kindness of strangers. Gulliver makes two points in this chapter which are interesting. First he comments that he would prefer to live in the land of the Houyhnhnms but because of the politics there and his comparison to the Yahoos (which the Houyhnhnms see as inferior beings) he is forced to leave. He spends a lot of time explaining why he would have preferred not to re-associate with humans which he now sees as Yahoos. The captain who rescues him is incredibly charitable to him but in the end when he returns to England he lives his life as a recluse separated from his wife and family and willing to spend hours in a day talking to horses, who he believes to be related to the Houyhnhnms.

Second he makes some biting comments about how other travel books have a tendency to exaggerate and how he told nothing but the truth. Obviously he was making a point here. The commentaries on the book suggest that he wrote the book as an Anti-Whig commentary but also as a spoof at the genre of writing. The political part of the manuscript is partially lost because some of his characterizations are lost on people who are not completely up on the politics of the time. Regardless of its intent - the book was an instant classic, and as I said in the first post according to some sources it has never been out of print since the first edition in 1726.

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