Compare and Contrast - The Lilliputians and the Brobdingnagians in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift’s magnum opus Gulliver’s Travels is the story of the astonishing voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, who is basically the narrator and protagonist of the tale. A parody of the popular travel narrative, Gulliver’s Travels combines adventure with savage satire, mocking English customs and the politics of the day. The phenomenal and continuing popularity of Gulliver's Travels raises the question that this essay will attempt to answer. Harold Bloom remarks on Gulliver’s Travels: "If the Tale-teller is a Swiftian parody of one side of Swift, the anti-Cartesian, anti-Hobbesian, then Gulliver is a Swiftian parody of the great ironist’s own misanthropy." (2) Swift’s A Tale of a Tub has much to do with our sense of its excess, with its force being so exuberantly beyond its form. Gulliver’s Travels, the later and lesser work, has survived for the common reader, and whereas Swift’s early masterpiece has not. Gulliver's Travels is the story of Lemuel Gulliver, a married s...