Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is well known as a fictional travel story about a man, Lemuel Gulliver, who visits far off lands and learns the methods of natives. I believe that the story is written poorly with gaps in the story that make you guess what the author is trying to tell you. What is meant by this is that Swift uses so much satire in his stories that you must "filter through Swift's satiric purposes to get to the real meaning of Gulliver's Travels" (Lawrence 96). I think a travel story should be written to inform the reader of far off places that teach the character something. While in Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver enjoys his trips to far off lands and goes into great details about his travels, but he never really uses his new ideas on life applications back in England. For example, by the end of the book, Gulliver has gone insane from all his travels and is even afraid of his own wife after his experiences with the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos. I do not like how the story goes straight into action while omitting crucial information that leads into the actions. Therefore, I believe Lemuel Gulliver, in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is an unreliable narrator in that he goes into great description about minor details, and because of this, he misses the larger implications of his travels.
In part one of the stories, Gulliver is a medical doctor that is shipwrecked to an uncharted island called Liliput, where the people are only six inches tall. He is somehow captured by these Lilliputians, even though he could probably kill them by breathing on them too hard. The big problem with this is how a six foot man can be conquered by six inch people. Gulliver describes them as little doll-like men and says the king is "taller by almost a breadth of my nail than any of his court" (Swift 18). I do not understand how Gulliver can be so gullible to respect such little creatures or show extra respect towards a king who is only a hair taller than his people.
