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Example research essay topic: York W W Norton W W Norton And Company - 1,294 words

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... ugh apparently perfect beings, are actually just clever imitations of the Augustans. As said before, the Augustans dedicated their lives to reason and truth. Much like the Augustans, everything the Houyhnhnms do is based on a scientific process. In their marriages they are exactly careful to choose such colors as will not make any disagreeable mixture in the breed. Strength is chiefly valued in the male, and comeliness in the female; not upon the account of love, but to preserve the race from degenerating; for where a female happens to excel in strength, a consort is chosen with regard to comeliness.

The lives of the horses lack passions, pleasures, and ideas. Even if they have no evils in their society, they have no real benefits either. If deleting all the risks in life is what it takes to eliminate vice, shouldn't mankind accept the necessity of a little bit of evil? The world in which the Houyhnhnms live is far from perfect.

Swift is brilliantly making fun of the Augustan goal. After all, the "Houyhnhnm" scenario is the way the Augustans strove to live their lives. Later, in the Romantic period, they would be criticized for their scientific approach to everything and their strict adherence to reason. In this way, Swift was ahead of his time, and, although his book did not glorify emotion or anything of that nature, it certainly ridiculed the Augustans and their ideals. The Augustans were a product of the Enlightenment, and with the help of social commentaries like Swift's, they began to die out as people began to see how senseless a life dedicated to reason truly was. At this point Gulliver is forced back into the complexities of existence and in the fact that he has a difficult task of readjustment is underscored by the fact that in all other books Gulliver's return is purely routine.

But in book four, he is deeply involved, and his extrication is more than the business of ending the voyage; the real issue is his re-accommodation to reality. The Gulliver of the last two chapters is a man suffering from an overdo of intellectualism, from having abstracted a neat pattern of the order able elements of existence from the tough, difficult, only partly manageable fabric of the whole. Swift has not so much condemned humanity as he has demonstrated two of its component elements- animality and rationality; and he has shown how an exclusive experience in the rarefied atmosphere of the latter, which can be presented only in an allegorical framework, can incapacitate the individual for normal human relationships. Gulliver has had a brilliant vision, and he has paid price: by the very nature of his analytic partition of man, he has abstracted so much from humanity that he can no longer endure the whole. He is neurotic, but the author is not content to leave him illuminated and solitary; at the end, Gulliver is bent upon the solution of his neurosis, upon habituating himself. In earlier passage Gulliver writes, when I happened to behold the reflection of my own form in a lake or fountain, I turned away my face in horror and detestation of myself, and could better endure the sight of a common Yahoo than my own person.

The latter passage: Gulliver plans regularly to behold my figure often in a glass, and thus if possible habituate myself by time to tolerate the sight of a human creature. In addition to that, Swift occasionally leaps from the existential to the metaphysical level, engaging somewhat inconclusively with the problem of evil. About the good Houyhnhnms there is no doubt, since they represent not only, as we have already seen, the operation of reason but also the perfection of nature (Chap. 3), that is, the two concepts which were available is Swifts day to represent the ideal order of the universe. And since the Yahoos lack reason, the implied theory of evil is that it is the equivalent of un-reason or the absence of reason. But while this may do admirably for the Yahoos themselves, who are allegorical figures, it obviously has its shortcomings as a conceptual means of disposing of Europeans, in whose life there are many phenomena, which cannot be adequately dealt with by a theory of irrationality about the essential nature of whose life errors Swift never quite makes up his mind, and whom he therefore pigeonholes in several different ways. 1. Evil is due to a corruption of reason. 2.

A little reason is dangerous thing. The Houyhnhnms connected European moral depths by imagining the conduct of a Yahoo who had a small proportion of reason (Chap. 10) 3. Reason itself is the agent of evil. The human race makes no other use of reason than to improve and multiply those vices whereof their brethren in this country had only the share that nature allotted them (Chap. 10).

Here it is not the absence, insufficiency, or corruption of reason, but reason itself that is the agent of evil. Yet the Houyhnhnms are devoted to the unerring rules of reason (Chap. 10) Hence, The whole system of Houyhnhnm land is, in fact, an allegory. The horses represent true reason and the Yahoos pure emotion. Either one of these taken to an extreme is dangerous.

If people let emotion completely rule them, they end up with a society without order, such as the Yahoos. On the other hand, if people dedicate themselves entirely to logic, they produce a society with plenty of order, but no vitality. A healthy community has a good mixture of the two. Swift leaves subtle clues like Gulliver's illogical misanthropy at the end to indicate that one must see the value in both.

Sadly, it is easy for a reader to walk away thinking that Swift thinks humanity to be evil. This piece in particular requires multiple readings to gather the true meaning of it. Indeed, there are many interpretations of the piece that criticize Swift for indicating that a flawless society could exist without religion of any kind. Obviously, the author of the criticism could not have possibly understood that the Houyhnhnms simply symbolized all that was rational, and religion would have been out of place in that context. Partially because of such subtleties, the Fourth Voyage, and indeed all of Gulliver's Travels, contains outstanding satire. In fact, in a bizarre way, Swift almost betrays readers with his satire.

He wins their trust with a tone of friendly conversation, and then begins to ruthlessly attack. Perhaps this was even why he was so effective. He also mastered irony by the time he died, as seen in his "A Modest Proposal. " His assaults on society did make people question themselves and their institution, and in a way, they did help to "wonderfully mend the world. " Works Cited: Crane, R. S. "The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the History of Ideas. " Greenburg 402 - 6.

Crane, R. S. "The Rationale of the Fourth Voyage. " Greenburg 331 - 8. Dyson, A. E. "Swift: The Metamorphosis of Irony. " The Writings of Jonathan Swift. Ed. Robert Greenburg.

New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973. 672 - 84. Glendinning, Victoria. Jonathan Swift: A Portrait.

New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998. Greenburg, Robert, ed. Gulliver's Travels: An Authoritative Text. New York: W. W.

Norton and Company, 1976. Kallich, Martin. The Other End of the Egg. Bridgeport: Conference on British Studies, 1970. Knowles, Ronald. Gulliver's Travels: The Politics of Satire.

New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990. Rose, A. L. Jonathan Swift: Major Profit.

London: Thames and Hudson, 1975. Swift, Jonathan. "A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms. " Gulliver's Travels. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Available web >


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r s, gulliver travels, york w w norton, jonathan swift, w w norton and company

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