Gulliver's travels into madness

By Crimson_Saddle3913

Just wrapped up Gulliver’s Travels, and honestly in the first few books it felt really hard to say what Gulliver was seeing was “made up,” since he brings back souvenirs and there are other people who can back it up, not just him. But I’m mostly gonna talk about Book 4, ignoring the rest, because it feels way different. Like, Gulliver ends up made captain, then his crew betrays him and leaves him stranded on an uncharted island. He wanders around looking for food and shelter, then runs into the natives, and they’re not exactly welcoming—trying to kill him. He escapes, but then it’s basically just sadness, despair, and this intense hatred toward mankind for what they did, even though he never went in wanting to hurt anyone. And then he starts getting more and more cut off from reality. He starts seeing horses out in the fields, living like everything’s calm and fair and they don’t have all that hatred. He goes to them, and surprisingly they don’t act bothered. Slowly he’s like, appreciating their whole way of life, imagining he can actually communicate, copying how they move and sound, preferring it over the whole complicated, messy, “civilized” world where people have all these pointless reasons. By the time he’s realizing his own view of reality was messed up, it turns into him wanting to bring that simpler philosophy back to the “civilized” humans of his world. But when he finally tries to return, he gets attacked by people again for no real reason, and it just spirals—despair, suicide attempt, until a kind guy named Don Pedro saves him. Book 4 can be read a bunch of different ways, and I don’t feel like it’s just one simple thing. It’s got madness, isolation, betrayal, tragedy, all that meaninglessness/nihilism stuff, but also hope. Gulliver’s Travels overall is really well done and deserves all the praise, but Book 4 alone honestly feels like it’s worth discussing way more, like it could stand on its own and still spark debate.