Annoyingly Political???? What a surprise!

          So when I first started Part I, of Gulliver’s Travels I found he was…whiny? But not really? I’m really not sure what to feel about Gulliver as a character.  Pompous also comes to mind at times.  Although this was the least challenging text we’ve read all semester, I found his long paragraphs to be distracting and somewhat annoying at times.  I mean…some of that stuff I really don’t even care about! Like how he got his education and how his poor father ran out of money so Gulliver had to take an apprenticeship and work for it like the rest of us (what a tragedy!) See what I did there? Just trying to prove my point through mimicry of  Gulliver’s rant-y style.  I also have a beef with the way he addresses his readers, or rather, dictates what they should think.  An example would be in the description (or lack thereof) of his travels on two ships to the East and West-Indies.  He goes through the trouble to tell us that this happened, but then tells us that, “It would not be proper, for some reasons, to trouble the reader with the particulars of our adventures in those seas…” (17).  Seriously???  Then why spend all this time telling us about it? Why not just say, “Hey, I was a surgeon on two ships and a storm caused one to sink and that’s where this story begins.”? Teasing us with information we’ll never know is pretty lazy.

          So the above was my initial reaction to the story.  But after some careful thought, I realized that this tactic is actually pretty brilliant.  I see this as an extremely political novel. I’m not all that familiar with British history, but I do know enough to recognize that England was going through some political shit at this time (Excuse the language, but that’s just how basic my knowledge is on this subject.)   Within the broad scheme of Gulliver's Travels (at least Part I) Gulliver seems to be an average man in eighteenth-century England. He is concerned with family and with his job, yet he is confronted by the pigmies that politics and political theorizing make of people. Gulliver is utterly incapable of the stupidity of the Lilliputian politicians, and, therefore, he and the Lilliputians are ever-present contrasts for us. We are always aware of the difference between the imperfect (but normal) moral life of Gulliver, and the petty and stupid political life of emperors, prime ministers, and informers.  So all of the lengthy, almost pretentious paragraphs are a reflection of the pettiness.  Just like Aphra Behn, Swift is trying to make a political statement.  But he has to present a story in which his readers are caught up in a rather appealing adventure while simultaneously gaining the knowledge to look at politics from a new perspective.  Well played, Jonathan Swift…Well played.