What does Gulliver learn in Lilliput and Brobdingnag?

What perspective on human life and human society does Gulliver learn in Lilliput and Brobdingnag? Are the things that Gulliver learns during his first voyage consistent, contradictory, or complementary to what he learns during the second? Do the two experiences shed light on one another?

Jonathan Swift’s novel “Gulliver’s Travels” was published in 1726. “Gulliver’s Travels” is a fictitious satire written by Jonathan Swift. On the big scale of things, Gulliver looks to be an ordinary man in eighteenth-century England in Gulliver’s Travels. He is concerned about his family and his job, but he must also contend with the difficulties that politics and political philosophy impose. Gulliver, a travel-minded Englishman who was trained as a surgeon who sailed to sea when his business failed. Rarely does the narrative of the dying first-person show any signs of self-reflection or a deeply sensitive response, as Gulliver describes the adventures he undertook on these trips.

Gulliver learns in Lilliput and Brobdingnag

Gulliver’s Travels is a novel about perspectives. Although the story is a surplus of possible morality, the strongest and most consistent message is a lesson in relativity, one’s perspective depends on one’s own physical and social situation and looks at people’s situation and explains a lot about their respective perspectives. Gulliver explaining relativity, explaining that the notions of beauty, goodness, and fairness in England are quite different from the notions of the qualities of people who visit other countries. Gulliver is able to see merit in the perspective of his own country and the perspectives of other nations, a just mentality in which he immerses himself in different cultures and adopts their opposite perspectives.

In fact, his travels have a perfect symmetry: he is going to be a giant among the Lilliputians, going from being a tiny person among the Brobdingnagians; He exploits the world of tiny humans for his own profit by showing Lilliputian animals for profit in England and in turn, is exploited in the world of monsters by the Brobdingnagian peasant, who charges people to look at Gulliver. Although Gulliver is constantly surprised by the differences and strangeness among foreigners, he is constantly comparing them to those who have returned to England, even finding analog or comparison points for the least familiar customs.

Gulliver’s Travels is an adventure story indeed, an unfortunate story involving several voyages of the ship’s surgeon Lemuel Gulliver, who lives on many unknown islands due to a perilous series on his way to a recognized port, people of unusual size, behavior, and philosophy, but after each adventure, he can return to his home in England where he recovers from this unusual experience and then sets out again on a new journey after learning about the world and the human culture and nature and improve himself.


Also read: Othello Summary and Themes