essay topics for gulliver's travels

Gulliver's Travels

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Gulliver's Travels: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World.

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-4

Part 1, Chapters 5-8

Part 2, Chapters 1-4

Part 2, Chapters 5-8

Part 3, Chapters 1-6

Part 3, Chapters 7-11

Part 4, Chapters 1-6

Part 4, Chapters 7-12

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

How is Gulliver characterized in the text? Consider his biographical background, his personality, his interactions with others, and his narrative style . How does Gulliver present himself? Do his actions line up with his self-presentation? Why or why not?

The Lilliputians often seem to behave as a European society in miniature. In what ways do they reflect some of the social and political norms of Swift’s time? What is the wider significance of their representation in the novel?

Gulliver’s Travels is presented as a first-person travel memoir . How does Swift use and/or parody some of the conventions and tropes associated with the genre? How does Gulliver’s Travels fit into the discourse around travel, exploration, and colonialism current during his time?

Related Titles

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Gulliver's Travels Essay Topics & Writing Assignments

Essay Topic 1

Gulliver is clearly an explorer at heart, even though he is a doctor by profession. Do you feel that it was appropriate for him to keep going on voyages, even though he kept leaving his family and just barely avoiding death when he did? If you were Gulliver, would you have given up traveling? If so, why and when would you have decided to stay home? Use details from the story to support your opinions.

Essay Topic 2

Choose any one of the times that Gulliver finds himself lost at sea and describe it in detail. How is he separated from his ship? How does he find land, finally? What sort of place does he find when he gets there, what people does he meet and what happens to him?

Essay Topic 3

The Lilliputian government officials are determined in a very unusual way through a rope dance...

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Gulliver’s Travels

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• The Guardian - The 100 best novels, No 3 – Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
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• Table Of Contents

Gulliver’s Travels , four-part satirical work by Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift , published anonymously in 1726 as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World . A keystone of English literature , it is one of the books that contributed to the emergence of the novel as a literary form in English. A parody of the then popular travel narrative, Gulliver’s Travels combines adventure with savage satire , mocking English customs and the politics of the day.

Gulliver’s Travels is a first-person narrative that is told from the point of view of Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon and sea captain who visits remote regions of the world, and it describes four adventures. In the first one, Gulliver is the only survivor of a shipwreck, and he swims to Lilliput, where he is tied up by people who are less than 6 inches (15 cm) tall. He is then taken to the capital city and eventually released. The Lilliputians’ small size mirrors their small-mindedness. They indulge in ridiculous customs and petty debates. Political affiliations, for example, are divided between men who wear high-heeled shoes (symbolic of the English Tories ) and those who wear low ones (representing the English Whigs ), and court positions are filled by those who are best at rope dancing. Gulliver is asked to help defend Lilliput against the empire of Blefuscu, with which Lilliput is at war over which end of an egg should be broken, this being a matter of religious doctrine. Gulliver captures Blefuscu’s naval fleet, thus preventing an invasion, but declines to assist the emperor of Lilliput in conquering Blefuscu. Later Gulliver extinguishes a fire in the royal palace by urinating on it. Eventually he falls out of favour and is sentenced to be blinded and starved. He flees to Blefuscu, where he finds a normal-size boat and is thus able to return to England.

Gulliver’s second voyage takes him to Brobdingnag, inhabited by a race of giants. A farm worker finds Gulliver and delivers him to the farm owner. The farmer begins exhibiting Gulliver for money, and the farmer’s young daughter, Glumdalclitch, takes care of him. One day the queen orders the farmer to bring Gulliver to her, and she purchases Gulliver. He becomes a favourite at court, though the king reacts with contempt when Gulliver recounts the splendid achievements of his own civilization. The king responds to Gulliver’s description of the government and history of England by concluding that the English must be a race of “odious vermin.” Gulliver offers to make gunpowder and cannon for the king, but the king is horrified by the thought of such weaponry. Eventually Gulliver is picked up by an eagle and then rescued at sea by people of his own size.

On Gulliver’s third voyage he is set adrift by pirates and eventually ends up on the flying island of Laputa. The people of Laputa all have one eye pointing inward and the other upward, and they are so lost in thought that they must be reminded to pay attention to the world around them. Though they are greatly concerned with mathematics and with music, they have no practical applications for their learning. Laputa is the home of the king of Balnibarbri, the continent below it. Gulliver is permitted to leave the island and visit Lagado, the capital city of Balnibarbri. He finds the farm fields in ruin and the people living in apparent squalor. Gulliver’s host explains that the inhabitants follow the prescriptions of a learned academy in the city, where the scientists undertake such wholly impractical projects as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. Later Gulliver visits Glubbdubdrib, the island of sorcerers, and there he speaks with great men of the past and learns from them the lies of history. In the kingdom of Luggnagg he meets the struldbrugs, who are immortal but age as though they were mortal and are thus miserable. From Luggnagg he is able to sail to Japan and thence back to England.

In the fourth part, Gulliver visits the land of the Houyhnhnms , a race of intelligent horses who are cleaner and more rational, communal, and benevolent (they have, most tellingly, no words for deception or evil) than the brutish, filthy, greedy, and degenerate humanoid race called Yahoos, some of whom they have tamed—an ironic twist on the human-beast relationship. The Houyhnhnms are very curious about Gulliver, who seems to be both a Yahoo and civilized, but, after Gulliver describes his country and its history to the master Houyhnhnm , the Houyhnhnm concludes that the people of England are not more reasonable than the Yahoos. At last it is decided that Gulliver must leave the Houyhnhnms. Gulliver then returns to England, so disgusted with humanity that he avoids his family and buys horses and converses with them instead.

Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift

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Gulliver’s Travels Essays

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The Duality of Book Four of Gulliver's Travels Ryan Norris

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The Failure of Paradise in Gulliver's Travels Sunny Hwang

It is human nature to strive for paradise, but is it actually attainable? There have been countless attempts to establish utopian societies, yet ultimately, all have failed. In his work, Gulliver's Travels, Swift recounts the journeys of Gulliver...

On the Style of Jonathan Swift Anonymous

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Gulliver's Lost Identity Erin M Brogan

J.R.R. Tolkein once said "not all who wander are lost." It is to be assumed, then, he was not talking about Capt. Lemuel Gulliver. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift is a narrative of the identity crisis. Capt. Gulliver is indeed lost, both...

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In the voyage to Brobdingnag section of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels , the title character fits a common psychological profile over 150 years before the theory describing it was technically defined. The story manifestly presupposes the...

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The Travel Log and its Depiction of the 'Other' Anonymous

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Analysis of Politics in Gulliver’s Travels

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Different Educational Traditions in Gulliver’s Travels

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The Line Between Satire and Utopia in Gulliver's Travels Book 4

The themes of sexual frustration and sublimation in gulliver's travels, jonathan swift was one of the greatest satirists, the duality of book four of gulliver’s travels, class system in gulliver's travels, fantomina, and moll flanders, how swift's satirical genius prevents him from changing the world, the deconstruction of the idea of paradise in gulliver's travels, gulliver’s travels and robinson crusoe: travel, trade and colonial context, johnathan swift’s satire in a modest proposal and gulliver’s travels, the characteristics of misanthropy in gulliver’s travels, the relation between truth and fiction in gulliver's travels, gulliver’s travels and candide: comparing the construction of satire through naiveté, the concept of confusion and its construction in gulliver's travels, the themes of money and rank in moll flanders and gulliver’s travels, how jonathan swift created the character of gulliver.

28 October 1726

Jonathan Swift

Satire, fantasy

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