GULLIVER TRAVELS

Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is without question the most famous literature to emerge from this 18th century satiric tradition. It is the strongest, funniest, and yet in some ways most despairing cry for a halt to the trends initiated by seventeenth-century philosophy. In Book IV, we discover how Gulliver’s journey into a discovery of what man is becomes a journey into madness. We encounter, here, a cruel attack on man. This is an …

…misses the opportunity to achieve whatever goodness is in his power to attain. Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels is the most famous and most powerful protest against this modern project. The severity of his anger is, I think, a symptom of the extent to which he realized the battle was already being lost. To us, however, over two hundred years later, Swift’s point is perhaps more vividly relevant than many of his contemporaries.