GULLIVER’S TRAVELS: A BOOK REVIEW

ABSTRACT

Gulliver’s Travels is an adventure story (in reality, a misadventure story) involving several voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon, who, because of a series of mishaps en route to recognized ports, ends up, instead, on several unknown islands living with people and animals of unusual sizes, behaviors, and philosophies, but who, after each adventure, is somehow able to return to his home in England where he recovers from these unusual experiences and then sets out again on a new voyage. Presented as a simple traveler’s narrative, Gulliver’s adventures are divided into four parts. The first part is situated in Lilliput where he finds himself in the company of thousands of miniature people called Lilliputians. The second is on the peninsula-type land of Brobdingnag, an opposite world from Lilliput where Gulliver becomes the Lilliputian and everyone is a giant to him. The third part moves to the island of Laputa, a floating island inhabited by theoreticians and academics which oppresses the land below, called Balnibarbi. Finally in the fourth part he arrives in an unknown land. This land is populated by Houyhnhnms, the rational-thinking horses who rule, and by Yahoos, the inferior brutish servants to the horses who bear the image of a human. 

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