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

Gulliver’s Travels is a famous work of satire, a style of writing that uses humor to parody and criticize the bad habits or foibles of people, institutions, and/or cultural, political, and religious beliefs. Swift’s primary satirical tool in Gulliver’s Travels is irony. Gulliver discusses what he experiences and observes with the utmost sincerity, without immediately recognizing the absurdity of what he is saying. Gulliver’s sincerity, and the sincerity of the characters around him, highlights the ridiculousness of his interactions. An example of the novel’s irony is when Gulliver refers to the “Yahoos” later in the book as filthy and detestable without realizing they are a baser human figure. In other words, he is actually calling the entire human race filthy and detestable without fully knowing it.

Swift also employs juxtaposition and hyperbole in the novel. In the first two chapters, Swift juxtaposes Gulliver’s time with the diminutive people of Lilliput with his time among the giants of Brobdingnag to create humorous inversions of Gulliver’s experiences with each. Swift often uses hyperbole to mock human hierarchies and social pretensions. For example, Gulliver is always quick to extol the virtues of kings simply because they are kings and not because of any particular merits they may have.

Finally, Swift’s satire is notable due to its sharply critical purpose: While Swift’s humor serves to create absurdity and entertainment, it also serves as a critique of many of the social and political failings Swift identified in his own time. For example, the novel’s island nation of Lilliput has a long-standing conflict that began when the emperor decreed that his subjects crack their boiled eggs at the narrower end. This petty disagreement leads to thousands of deaths, as many Lilliputians refuse to change their behavior. This conflict highly resembles the split between the Church of England and the Catholic church, which began over King Henry VIII’s desire for a divorce. In this era of British literature, satire was an important tool for criticizing institutions of power while maintaining plausible deniability—a king who censures a satirist is admitting he’s the butt of the joke.