Gulliver's Travels: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World.

Gulliver’s Travels is structured as a travelogue and closely mimics adventure novels of the time, such as Robinson Crusoe. Initially, Gulliver is presented to the reader as a proper Englishman trying to make his way in a middle-class life who is drawn to the sea, setting up a familiar character arc that will be undercut by the heightened nature of his journey. Though he presents himself as an admirable, upstanding person, there are several subtexts that emerge in the opening chapter: Gulliver readily abandons his wife for years at a time, and though he is concerned with what is “proper” when it comes to telling his story, there’s an implication that the propriety he brings to his narration is not in line with his personal behavior. Additionally, the islands he visits and their outsized difference from England sets up a repeated irony: Gulliver views the nations he visits as strange and overwhelming, but they are caught up in the same kinds of pettiness as English culture was at the time. Swift is suggesting that Gulliver is a typical Englishman who ignores what’s improper in his own life but clearly sees the problems in others.

Gulliver also presents himself as bashful when it comes to the functions of nature, such as when he urinates for the first time after three days in Lilliput. Gulliver says, “I would not have dwelt so long upon [this] circumstance […] if I had not thought it necessary to justify my character, in point of cleanliness, to the world; which I am told, some of my malingerers have been pleased […] to call into question” (13). Gulliver dwells on something that is natural and seemingly irrelevant to assert himself in the face of his so-called “malingerers” who have called into question his morality, further highlighting the disconnect between how Gulliver presents himself as the narrator and how he is perceived within the fictional world of the novel. Gulliver believes that this urination anecdote establishes his trustworthiness as a narrator, and that he withheld his urine for as long as he did shows off his aversion to human waste, thereby highlighting his cleanliness.

As Gulliver spends more time with the Lilliputians, he realizes that some of their practices are strange and seemingly trivial, especially when it comes to determining who is, and who is not, a member of the elite. For example, appointments in the royal court are decided by rope dancing. Gulliver mentions that “whoever jumps the highest, without falling, succeeds in the office” (19). For the diminutive Lilliputians, this activity poses real threats to life and limb; however, having success in performing the rope dance is not the same thing as having intellectual or moral qualifications that could justify a position of power in the royal court. Swift therefore uses the ritual to satirize the arbitrariness and lack of substance behind who gets to wield power in a royal court.

There is a similar arbitrariness behind the political and social tensions in Lilliput. Political divisions are based on who wears high-heeled shoes and who wears low-heels. Swift is subversively mocking political alignments that usually arise from similar such trivialities. In his time, it was the Whigs and the Tories of England; however, he is indicting all political division more broadly by suggesting that it is all built on irrelevancies that are usually distractions from how the elite wield power over the people. The egg dispute between Lilliput and Blefuscu serves a similar function by satirizing some of the religious tensions in Swift’s time: In becoming so heatedly invested in which side of the egg is the “right” one to crack, both sides overlook the fact that it is, ultimately, the same egg with the same result either way. The egg controversy mirrors the ongoing tensions over ritual and theology between Catholics and Protestants, as well as between rival Protestant sects, that were still active during Swift’s lifetime.