Gullible Gulliver

As I mentioned in the first post I created for this blog, this is not my first time reading Gulliver's Travels; however it is the first time I have looked at this text as anything but a fantastical fairy tale. This story has so many layers that it is hard to focus in on one area to blog about so I will be posting various things about the text as I go along. My first post will be about Gulliver's character.

Swift takes time at the start of the book to establish Gulliver as an average European; he is middle aged, well educated, sensible (in the first of the book at least), with no extravagantly romantic notions. He is an observer, looks after his family, tends to his business affairs, is not easily rattled, and there doesn't seem to be anything extraordinary about him. Gulliver could be considered an everyman. By creating a character such as this, Swift creates the ideal narrator for his tale. Gulliver is unimaginative, private, and unemotional so he will not impose himself onto the text; a perfect combination for an objective observer and narrator. He also does not question the status quo and he fully supports the culture which has produced him, and has developed no critical understanding of it; in essence, Gulliver is the ideal tabula rasa for Swift's tale.

In the first two books, we can see why he would naturally fall in with the Europeanness of the new world. He has never reflected at all on the rightness or wrongness of the given order of things, so he naturally supports the authority of the king, the ceremonies of the court, and the "fairness" of the justice system.

Only when he himself is sentenced to be blinded do we begin to sense that Gulliver is learning something. Circumstances are forcing him to think about, not just his own safety, but something much bigger: the justice of the proceedings. He is, in other words, beginning to develop a critical awareness of the limitations of the values of Lilliput and, beyond that, of the way in which the Europeans reflect those same values.

But alas, poor gullible Gulliver only holds onto these critical insights temporarily, and when he returns to England, he is quickly reconciled to European life. But in the second voyage the critical awareness returns, especially in relation to the physical grossness of the giant Brobdingnagians. Seeing these larger than life figures leads him to reflect upon the way in which Europeans have become obsessed with physical beauty, especially with the feminine body, when, from a different perspective, it is comically gross and even nauseating. Swift seems to have a problem with the female body as he continues to equate it to things that are gross and nauseating as we have seen in this text and in his poem, The Lady's Dressing Room.

However, this growing sense of a critical awareness in Book II does not lead Gulliver seriously to question his European values, and so he is prepared to defend the sorry history of Europe in the face of the King of Brobdingnag's scorn.

I found Gulliver's character did not grow very much in the first two voyages. He is still gullible, mainly a passive observer, and willing to maintain the status quo. The thing that is surprising to me is the lack of emotional responses from poor old Gulliver. It is strange that Gulliver is surprised but not shocked when he sees the Lilliputians for the first time and one would expect Gulliver to be struggling more to escape from these tiny people. Also, Gulliver seems to be so unaware of what is really going on in his world and the strange worlds he visits. It is this gullibility that allows the reader to see the satire that Swift has so cleverly woven into his fantastical tale