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Gulliver's Travels
Gulliver's Travels
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel
Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, commonly
known as Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), is a prose satire by Anglo-
Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift, that is both a satire on human
nature and a parody of the "travellers' tales" literary subgenre. It is Swift's best
known full-length work, and a classic of English literature.
The book became popular as soon as it was published. John Gay wrote in a
1726 letter to Swift that "It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the
nursery." Since then, it has never been out of print.
Plot summary
Despite his earlier intention of remaining at home, Gulliver returns to the sea as the captain
of a merchantman as he is bored with his employment as a surgeon. On this voyage he is
forced to find new additions to his crew, whom he believes to have turned the rest of the
crew against him. His crew then mutiny, and after keeping him contained for some time
resolve to leave him on the first piece of land they come across and continue as pirates. He
is abandoned in a landing boat and comes upon a race of hideous, deformed and savage
humanoid creatures to which he conceives a violent antipathy. Shortly afterwards he meets
the Houyhnhnms, a race of talking horses. They are the rulers, while the deformed
creatures called Yahoos are human beings in their base form. Gulliver becomes a member of
a horse's household, and comes to both admire and emulate the Houyhnhnms and their
lifestyle, rejecting his fellow humans as merely Yahoos endowed with some semblance of
reason which they only use to exacerbate and add to the vices Nature gave them. However,
an Assembly of the Houyhnhnms rules that Gulliver, a Yahoo with some semblance of
reason, is a danger to their civilisation, and expels him.
Part IV: A Voyage to the Country
of the Houyhnhnms