Gulliver's Travels Essay | Critical Essay #3

Gulliver's Travels Critical Essay #3

In the following excerpt, Elliott argues that Gulliver, an unreliable narrator who attacks others for his own faults, and who fails to make any distinctions between man in the particular and man in the abstract, is as great an object of satire as the beings he observes on his journeys.

If we ask who is the satirist of Gulliver's Travels, the answer obviously is Swift—or, if he is not "of" Gulliver's Travels, he is the satirist who creates the satire of Gulliver's Travels. But in the extended sense of the term we are familiar with Gulliver is also a satirist.…

This of course is the Gulliver of the Fourth Voyage, worlds removed from the ship's surgeon who was charmed with the Lilliputians and quick with praise of "my own dear native Country." That Gulliver, he of the early voyages, is so far from being a...
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