Message of Gulliver's Travels

By oldOwl1998

I honestly laughed at how clueless Gulliver can be—he’s acting all “civilized” while he’s doing something pretty barbaric to an entire city. It’s like he can’t really see what the whole thing means or how huge the consequences are for anyone down below. And Swift himself was a church guy, so it’s not like this book is some random shock value thing—still, the story keeps going back to bodily stuff and really nasty images. That feels like a pretty obvious moral clash to me. Also, I can’t stop thinking maybe Swift is basically pointing out the cracks in that whole humanism idea that was getting more popular back then—like the focus on the individual human experience. Is that way off? If you’ve read Gulliver’s Travels, how did you take it?