Cannibalism In Gulliver's Travels

Johnathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels focuses on Gulliver, a surgeon/explorer, who is on the quest to find an adventure. Swift allows Gulliver to be a quick witted and tongue-in-cheek kind of character which further expands the story. When Gulliver expresses his feeling towards Lilliputians, he feels as if he is a god among men but changes when he encounters the Houyhnhnms as he sees human beings as savage-like creatures. Swift uses Gulliver as ploy to mock European politics using events taken around the time of the novel’s creation. Mentions of English politics and how much politics actually have a hold on England is slipped under the rug, that being said, the political jargon is used to address a more serious matter. The governments and their inhabitants Gulliver encounters are a representation of the English and how they come to terms living with it. The first point used by Swift is to acknowledge the fact that government and politics are unethical and suite the needs of the wealthy. Throughout the novel, Gulliver interprets the English government to run by men who, …show more content…
In an almost identical scenario, Gulliver devises a plan with the Houyhnhnms to eradicate the Yahoo’s. But like Swift, Gulliver researches the lives of the Yahoo’s and discovers the young to be the most nimble and useful of all the ages of the yahoo’s (Gulliver’s Travels. IV. Ch:8). Jonathan Swift uses terms in A Modest Proposal like “delicious” and “healthy” to deter the reader from realizing what he is suggesting, which is eating of the weak and vulnerable. A Modest Proposal and Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels is used to address that people in a society can abuse their power to reap all the benefits. Although Swift mentions cannibalism and Gulliver devises a plan to eradicate the Yahoo’s, they see a larger benefit in those ideas than having the weak be a burden to