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Informal Journal In Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver first encounters the tiny Lilliputians after he is shipwrecked. He wakes up to find himself bound by countless tiny threads that the tiny people used to restrain and contain him. Their tiny size is purely symbolic in nature, because Jonathan Swift's tale is mainly a satire on England. The Lilliputians stood no more than six inches high in size, but overtook and had control over Gulliver who was vastly larger than them. In this size discrepancy, Swift was recognizing that England was only a tiny island but was able to employ its knowledge and skills to overtake and become the world's most influential and dominant force. Despite England's tiny size, it had the ability to defeat any nation that might pose a threat and try to conquer it.
There is also further commentary on England through both the size and the attitude of the Lilliputians. Although they are incredibly small from Gulliver's point of view, they do not see themselves in the same way that he does. Their view of themselves is that they are of normal size, and Gulliver is freakishly large. While there may be some commentary on England's over-inflated ego and view of itself, it is also a reminder to England and European society that size, strength and power are relative, and that Europe could not be certain that larger, Gulliver-like power could not come along to conquer them. There is further symbolism in the size of the Lilliputians. While Gulliver is learning more about their ways, he finds that their culture is based on very small, trivial issues, which is parallel to their small stature.
One such practice is that they choose their government officials by rope dancing. The Lilliputians see these practices as completely normal, but to an outsider like Gulliver, the practices are completely ridiculous. This particular scene is more satire on the British government; the actual government also elected their ministers in a trivial manner. In Gulliver's second voyage, the perspective shifts as Gulliver is put in the same size relation that the Lilliputians were in comparison to him. He meets the Brobdingnagians, which Swift uses for some of his darker political criticism.
The large Brobdingnagians base their culture on common sense, and when Gulliver explains European society to their king, he decides that they must be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. This sets up two symbolic comparisons for European culture and society in Swift's time. First, the snap judgement of the king on European society as Gulliver describes it serves to show that he, the large superpower is assuming that his way of thinking is automatically the correct point of view. Swift also seems to share the view of the king, and he voices this when the king points out that European government and society must be riddled with rampant corruption at every level. The other part of political satire with the Brobdingnagians is that when Gulliver offers to give the king the secret of gun powder, he is completely horrified. The king is coming from a common-sense type of thinking, but Gulliver cannot understand why the king would not want this knowledge.
Swift is commenting on Europe's delusion that any new means of hurting or killing people must be an important, helpful invention. In some ways Gulliver represents the average Englishman of his day, because he is a medium of the two different countries. The Brobdingnagians represent a more moral and rational point of view than Gulliver has, while the Lilliputians represent a more trivial and nonsensical point of view. Gulliver, in some ways, represents an innocent individual who is swept up in the circumstances of the cultures and governments that he is in. In this way, he truly represents the average Englishman, because while they may be part of a culture that has different problems that Swift symbolizes in his story, they as individuals are not all guilty of either the problems or responsible for the strengths of the society.
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Research essay sample on Point Of View European Society
