Gulliver is the undistinguished third of five sons of a man of very modest means. He is of good and solid — but unimaginative — English stock. Gulliver was born in Nottinghamshire, a sedate county without eccentricity. He attended Emmanuel College, a respected, but not dazzling, school. The neighborhoods that Gulliver lived in — Old Jury, Fetter Lane, and Wapping — are all lower-middle-class sections. He is, in short, Mr. British middle class of his time.
Gulliver is also, as might be expected, "gullible." He believes what he is told. He is an honest man, and he expects others to be honest. This expectation makes for humor — and also for irony. We can be sure that what Gulliver tells us will be accurate. And we can also be fairly sure that Gulliver does not always understand the meaning of what he sees. The result is a series of astonishingly detailed, dead-pan scenes. For example, when Gulliver awakens in Lilliput, he gradually discovers, moving from one exact detail to another, that he is a prisoner of men six inches tall.
In Book I, Gulliver's possesses moral superiority to the petty — and tiny — Lilliputians, who show themselves to be a petty, cruel, vengeful, and self-serving race. Morally and politically, Gulliver is their superior. Here, Swift, through Gulliver, makes clear that the normal person is concerned with honor, gratitude, common sense, and kindness. The representative person (a Lilliputian) is a midget, figuratively and literally, compared with a moral person (Gulliver).
