Sunday, July 12, 2015

What experiences did Gulliver gather in Lilliput?

In Gulliver's Travels, eye, image, light are the ruler in a world of proportions. In the sense of the same optical effects, we can say that during the first Gulliver's travels, Swift uses the telescope. In Lilliput, the people are small, not only in their body stature but in the soul, also. At first, Gulliver has illusive  impressions about the king-dwarf and his court, but gradually, he realizes more about the truth, depicting to the reader whole cortege of defects of the English court and aristocracy of that time: vanity, incalculable ambition , despotism, ingratitude, intrigue,struggle for power , corruption, flattery, hypocrisy. On the second trip, Swift seems to resort to magnifying optical devices: a magnifying glass, microscope.


Gulliver's experiences in both world are emphasizing the ideea of integrate attempts failing of  an individual, in a society where he doesn't fit at all.


The culture of that period, Enlightenment, was presenting the human kind more as a pure soul than a body, the human aspects captured and described in Gulliver's travel, having the aim to present human condition in a light more real, harsh and unfeeling, as it is, and less unreal and artificial decorated than the tendency of presentation of culture of eighteenth-century was.

No comments:

Post a Comment