Comment on Swift’s style in “Gulliver’s Travels”.
Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels is a fictitious Journey through imaginative countries
prefaced by an introduction in an exquisite view of irony, upon the art of
writing history. On the surface, Gulliver’s Travels is an adventure
story containing a fanciful account of strange and wonderful lands. But, at the
centre, it is actually a satire on mankind. The style adopted by Swift in Gulliver’s
Travels is satiric. The passages of satirical allusion are few, and thrown
at random among a scattered mass of incoherent fiction. But no word drops from
Swift’s pen in vain where his work ceases for a moment to satirize the view of
mankind in general. Gulliver’s Travels, as W.H. Hudson points out, “turns out, on closer inspection to be one
of the bitterest satires on mankind ever penned.”
Gulliver’s Travels has four parts. Each
part has its own peculiar mood and atmosphere. The book gives us a fanciful
account of the various voyages of a man called Lemuel Gulliver. Every voyage is
an adventure itself and has a fanciful account of strange events. It is through
fantasy that the Swiftian satire becomes entertaining.
In
the first book, the satire is good humoured. Here swift satirizes the court,
the politics and the nature of man. It is funny to see the tiny king desiring
to become “the sole monarch of the
whole world”. The satire against human pride does
not interfere with our enjoyment of the story............
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