Gulliver's Travels Symbolism

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Gulliver’s Travels is a novel authored by Jonathan Swift in 1726. The novel is a satire, a critical attitude mixed with humor and wit, and an allegory, an extended metaphor, of eighteenth century English politics. Lemuel Gulliver, the protagonist, embarks on four journeys to four strange and unknown countries. The fourth and final visit is to the land of the Houyhnhnms. This country is inhabited by Houyhnhnms, horses with reason and intellect, and Yahoos, human-like beings who are monstrous and obtuse. In this fourth part of the novel, Gulliver no longer has a care for humankind and he comes to idolize Houyhnhnm society. The Houyhnhnm society is a republic governed and guided by the principles of reason and integrity. The power of Houyhnhnm …show more content…
The Houyhnhnms have a class system within their ‘utopia.’ There are a group of Houyhnhnms who are born as servants and are referred to by Gulliver as “the race of inferior Houyhnhnms” (Swift 282). The Houyhnhnms are limited to two children, but the servants, the “inferior Houyhnhnms,” are not restricted to the two offspring limit as they need to serve the superior Houyhnhnms. In addition, the Houyhnhnms have different colors pertaining to the different class systems. “That among the Houyhnhnms, the white, the sorrel, and the iron-grey, were not exactly shaped as the bay, the dapple-grey, and the black; nor born with equal talents of the mind, or a capacity to improve them; and therefore continued always in the condition of servants, without ever aspiring to match out of their own race, which in that country would be reckoned monstrous and unnatural” (Swift 270). The Houyhnhnms acknowledge the class systems and purposely maintain it in order to serve the superior and high-class Houyhnhnms. The obvious discriminations are flaws that Gulliver is oblivious to because he is blinded by what is supposedly a perfect

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