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Gulliver's Travels Summary

satirizing the ways of England.
that they are miserable.
Gulliver stays with the Houyhnhnms for several years, becoming completely enamored
feels disgusted about other humans, including his own family.

Captain Lemuel Gulliver, the narrator.
their island when the Lilliputians convict him of treason.

The Emperor
The leader of the Lilliputians. He initially is friendly toward Gulliver but changes his mind
about him when Gulliver refuses to continue fighting Blefuscu and puts out a fire in the
Empress's chamber by urinating on it.
The Farmer
farmer eventually sells Gulliver to the Queen.
Gulliver's enemy at Lilliput, he accuses Gulliver of sleeping with his wife.
Her name means "little nurse" in Brobdingnagian. This is what Gulliver calls the farmer's
daughter, who cares for him during his stay in Brobdingnag.
Mrs. Mary Burton Gulliver
Gulliver's wife.
A species of horses who are endowed with great kindness and virtue. Gulliver lives among
them for several years and afterwards is extremely reluctant to return to England.
The King
comparing their two cultures.
The inhabitants of a floating island who wear mathematical and astronomical symbols and
have trouble paying attention.
The inhabitants of Lilliput. They are about five to six inches tall. They are the sworn
enemies of the Blefuscudians of a neighboring Island.

The Balnibarbi Lord who shows Gulliver around and teaches him about why the island is
so barren.
Don Pedro
The captain of the Portuguese ship that picks Gulliver up after his voyage to the country of
the Houyhnhnms.
The Queen
Gulliver is disgusted when she eats.
A friend of Gulliver's in Lilliput. He helps Gulliver settle into the strange new land and
later helps to reduce Gulliver's possible punishment for treason from execution to having
his eyes put out.
The Houyhnhnms' word for humans. Yahoos in the country of the Houyhnhnms are
disgusting creatures.

(See Important Quotations Explained)
The novel begins with Lemuel Gulliver recounting the story of his life, beginning with his
family history. He is born to a family in Nottinghamshire, the third of five sons. Although
he studies at Cambridge as a teenager, his family is too poor to keep him there, so he is sent
to London to be a surgeons apprentice. There, under a man named James Bates, he learns
mathematics and navigation with the hope of traveling. When his apprenticeship ends, he
studies physics at Leyden.
He then becomes a surgeon aboard a ship called the Swallow for three years. Afterward, he
settles in London, working as a doctor, and marries a woman named Mary Burton. His
business begins to fail when his patron dies, so he decides to go to sea again and travels for
six years. Although he has planned to return home at the end of this time, he decides to
accept one last job on a ship called the Antelope.

In the East Indies, the Antelope encounters a violent storm in which twelve crewmen die.
Six of the crewmembers, including Gulliver, board a small rowboat to escape. Soon the
rowboat capsizes, and Gulliver loses track of his companions. They are never seen again.
Gulliver, however, swims safely to shore.
Gulliver lies down on the grass to rest, and soon he falls asleep. When he wakes up, he
finds that his arms, legs, and long hair have been tied to the ground with pieces of thread.
He can only look up, and the bright sun prevents him from seeing anything. He feels
something move across his leg and over his chest. He looks down and sees, to his surprise,
a six-inch-tall human carrying a bow and arrow. At least forty more little people climb onto
his body. He is surprised and shouts loudly, frightening the little people away. They return,
however, and one of the little men cries out, Hekinah Degul.
Gulliver struggles to get loose and finally succeeds in breaking the strings binding his left
arm. He loosens the ropes tying his hair so he can turn to the left. In response, the little
people fire a volley of arrows into his hand and violently attack his body and face. He
decides that the safest thing to do is to lie still until nightfall. The noise increases as the
little people build a stage next to Gulliver about a foot and a half off the ground. One of
them climbs onto it and makes a speech in a language that Gulliver does not understand.
Gulliver indicates that he is hungry, and the little people bring him baskets of meat. He
devours it all and then shows that he is thirsty, so they bring him two large barrels of wine.
Gulliver is tempted to pick up forty or fifty of the little people and throw them against the
ground, but he decides that he has made them a promise of goodwill and is grateful for their
hospitality. He is also struck by their bravery, since they climb onto his body despite his
great size.
An official climbs onto Gullivers body and tells him that he is to be carried to the capital
city. Gulliver wants to walk, but they tell him that that will not be permitted. Instead, they
bring a frame of wood raised three inches off the ground and carried by twenty-two wheels.
Nine hundred men pull this cart about half a mile to the city. Gullivers left leg is then
padlocked to a large temple, giving him only enough freedom to walk around the building
in a semicircle and lie down inside the temple.
Gullivers narrative begins much like other travel records of his time. The description of his
youth and education provides background knowledge, establishes Gullivers position in
English society, and causes the novel to resemble true-life accounts of travels at sea
published during Swifts lifetime. Swift imitates the style of a standard travelogue
throughout the novel to heighten the satire. Here he creates a set of expectations in our
minds, namely a short-lived belief in the truth of Gullivers observations. Later in the
novel, Swift uses the style of the travelogue to exaggerate the absurdity of the people and
places with which Gulliver comes into contact. A fantastical styleone that made no
attempt to seem truthful, accurate, or traditionalwould have weakened the satire by
making it irrelevant, but the factual, reportorial style of Gullivers Travels does the

Gulliver is surprised to discover the Lilliputians but is not particularly shocked. This
encounter is only the first of many in the novel in which we are asked to accept Gullivers
extraordinary experiences as merely unusual. Seeing the world through Gullivers eyes, we
also adopt, for a moment, Gullivers view of the world. But at the same time, we can step
back and recognize that the Lilliputians are nothing but a figment of Swifts imagination.
The distance between these two stancesthe gullible Gulliver and the skeptical readeris
where the narratives multiple levels of meaning are created: on one level, we have a truelife story of adventure; on another, a purely fictional fairy tale; and on a third level,
transcending the first two and closest to Swifts original intention, a satirical critique of
European pretensions to rationality and goodwill.
Swift wrote Gullivers Travels at a time when Europe was the worlds dominant power, and
when England, despite its small size, was rising in power on the basis of its formidable
fleet. Englands growing military and economic power brought it into contact with a wide
variety of new animals, plants, places, and things, but the most significant change wrought
by European expansion was the encounter with previously unknown peoplelike the
inhabitants of the Americaswith radically different modes of existence. The miniature
stature of the Lilliputians can be interpreted as a physical incarnation of exactly these kinds
of cultural differences.
The choice of physical size as the way of manifesting cultural differences has a number of
important consequences. The main consequence is the radical difference in power between
Gulliver and the Lilliputian nation. His physical size and strength put Gulliver in a unique
position within Lilliputian society and give him obligations and capabilities far beyond
those of the people who keep him prisoner. Despite Gullivers fear of the Lilliputians
arrows, there is an element of condescension in his willingness to be held prisoner by them.
The power differential may represent Englands position with respect to the people it was in
the process of colonizing. It may also be a way for Swift to reveal the importance of might
in a society supposedly guided by right. Finally, it may be a way of destabilizing
humanitys position at the center of the universe by demonstrating that size, power, and
significance are all relative. Although the Lilliputians are almost pitifully small in
Gullivers eyes, they are unwilling to see themselves that way; rather, they think of
themselves as normal and of Gulliver as a freakish giant. That Gulliver may himself be the
Lilliputian to some other nations Englishmana notion elaborated fully in Part IIis
already implied in the first chapter.

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