Treasure Island

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a parody of the travelogues popular during Swift's time; the book is a satire, attempting bitterly to "laugh men out of their folly if they cannot be flogged out of it." As opposed to Defoe's straightforward narrative, Swift employs irony (reversals of the reader's expectations) in order to accomplish his satirical intent. For example, Swift tirelessly ridicules Gulliver when, in the land of the little people, Gulliver is inordinately proud of his comparatively gigantic stature, his ability to consume vast quantities of food and drink, and his knack for excreting said nutrients. At one point, when the royal palace is on fire, Gulliver takes great pride in urinating on the fire and extinguishing it. Swift's monarch, Queen Anne, was not amused. When proud Gulliver (whom American students invariably dub "Gullible") goes to the land of the giants, he ironically reverses his character and becomes a self-centered little clown, dancing and capering, defeating gigantic rats with his little saber, besmearing himself with cow dung when he tries to demonstrate his capacities as a broad-jumper, and taking pride in being the favorite of giantesses at the court, who seem to regard little Gulliver as something of a sex toy. Later, when Gulliver travels to the Academy at Lagado, Swift pokes fun at the various academic staff for their pseudo-intellectual posing, their vacuous theories, and their general arrogance. Academics in Swift's day were not amused; many academics today are equally unamused. As he takes Gulliver through the book, Swift's vision of Gulliver and mankind grows darker and darker. The Yahoos, humanoids whom Gulliver resembles, make war on one another and on Gulliver by pelting fistfuls of fecal matter, not unlike monkeys in a zoo. At the book's end, Gulliver's masters (the horses that he so abjectly admires) deduce that he is himself a Yahoo and get rid of him. When Gulliver returns home, he is so cynical about mankind that he cannot abide his own wife, and he retires to live with the horses in a stable.