‘GULLIVER’S TRAVELS’-A SATIRIC MAGNUM OPUS OF SWIFT. By; Maimoona Ijaz

Gulliver’s Travels is a pilgrimage that brings one face to face with the yahoo image of man. Its climate is a metaphoric satire on the nature of man. Swift’s satire seems to have almost a religious purpose. His satiric vision of an irrational world, a vision that becomes his prelude to an act of faith. Swift has created a whole world of smooth, elegant, dignified people, performing the gestures of a rational society, except for one trivial difference; there is a void at the center of things. Men have become objects, suits of clothes, and inside, all is empty, no soul, no heart, and no mind. Sartorism is the image of pretense-a society of mountebanks, a puppet show world with a fat face pretending that it is rational and ordered. Swift’s satires show the madness of man’s reason. His satire arises from the painful awareness of human existence. It is a punching Juvenilia satire. But as a fiction it is written with the convention of Menippean Satire, being a free play of intellectual fancy, the ridicule of the philosophus gloriosus ; digressing narrative and the use of dialogues for the interplay of attitudes. Jonathan Swift is best known as a kaleidoscopic and versatile satirist and ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ is a fine example of his satiric genre. Swift has implied a variety of satiric techniques to reveal human follies, absurdities, imbecility, paradoxes, irony, similes and metaphors. There are two major types of satire employed in ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ namely; comic satire and corrosive satire. Comic satire is amusing and witty and makes us laugh. While corrosive satire is serious and scornful and hardly provides any mirth. To encapsulate, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is a dexterous conglomeration of both types of satires. Swift s sometimes condemned as a Misanthrope. Gulliver’s fourth voyage has long been a stumbling block. In the way so a proper appraisal so the art of Swift. Early on critics were very much upset by the tone of this voyage. They castigated Swift as ‘inveterate Misanthrope’. Thackeray’s outburst is worth mentioning in this context; ‘It is yahoo language, a monster gibbering shrieks and gnashing imprecations against mankind. Tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of shame; filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, ragging, obscene’. But apart from all this criticism, it’s a truth universally acknowledged by all critics, that ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ is one of the world’s great satires and perhaps the most severe one. The voyage four is its climax, plain spoken, terrible and upsetting in the extreme to our optimistic view of man’s nature and achievement. The chief end of Swift’s lab ours is to ‘vex the world rather than divert it’. Swift makes Gulliver his plenipotentiary, to expose the imbecility, stolidity and imperfection of mankind. In the first voyage the land of Lilliputian represent the unreasonableness of religious and political conflicts. The Big-Indians and the Little-Indians in Lilliputian represent two major divisions of Christianity. Rope-dancing here represents Sir Robert Walpole’s skill at parliamentary strategy and political intrigue. The conflict between High Heels and Low-Heels represents the conflict between the two political parties. To epitomize one may assert that ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ is Swift’s magnum opus enriched with a perfect and dexterous conglomeration of both comic and corrosive satire.