Курсовая работа: Human being hypostases in "Gulliver’s travels" by Johnatan Swift

Human being hypostases in "Gulliver’s travels" by Johnatan Swift

Содержание

• Moldova State University
• The Department of World Literature
• Course paper:
• Gaivarovschi Iana
• B.A.Cristina Babina
• Chisinau 2007
• II. The human being hypostases as presented in “Gulliver’s Travels”
• 2.1.The protagonist presentation
• Lemuel Gulliver is an unremarkable and unimaginative man from middle-class England. He is morally upright and honest but, as his name suggests, somewhat gullible. As he himself is honest, he naively assumes that everyone else is as honest, and hence believes what he is told. He is an everyman through whose eyes the reader sees and judges the people he encounters. Gulliver, as the name suggests, is someone who is ‘gullible’. This gullible traveler has written a travelogue, which consists of four different voyages: Each voyage appears to be entirely different from the other three voyages. This is one of the reasons why Swift has divided the voyages into four parts. Gulliver represents an everyman, a middle-class Englishman who is fundamentally decent and well intentioned. In the course of his travels, he becomes less tolerant and more judgmental of the nations he visits and of his fellow human beings.
• “Gulliver is gullible, as his name suggests. For example, he misses the obvious ways in which the Lilliputians exploit him. While he is quite adept at navigational calculations and the humdrum details of seafaring, he is far less able to reflect on himself or his nation in any profoundly critical way”17. Traveling to such different countries and returning to England in between each voyage, he seems poised to make some great anthropological speculations about cultural differences around the world, about how societies are similar despite their variations or different despite their similarities. But, frustratingly, Gulliver gives us nothing of the sort. He provides us only with literal facts and narrative events, never with any generalizing or philosophizing. He is a self-hating, self-proclaimed Yahoo at the end, announcing his misanthropy quite loudly, but even this attitude is difficult to accept as the moral of the story. Gulliver is not a figure with whom we identify but, rather, part of the array of personalities and behaviors about which we must make judgments.