Gulliver's Travels and its symbolism with reality

Through this Satire we have learned a lot about how Jonathan Swift used the irony and humour to show the real situations and citicyze some social problems that were happening in those days. It requires a lot of creativity, carefull and eye for details in order to understand the whole creation and its meanings with the symbols calling for reality.

A satire is a literary form that consists of the use of humor, irony to show something or someone is weak, foolish or bad. This literary work is used with sarcasm to expose or discredit vices or bad qualities of something.

The main purpose of this device relays on the social criticism; it ridicules problems with the society or government so people can indirectly reflect and pay attention to what is happening. The satire has been used in literary works as Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, with the criticism of slavery. Another example could be Animal Farm by George Orwell making reference to the Russian Revolution and including all the participants of it in the story as animals.

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift is another example, Swift is one of the leader or the satiric style making humor form the human nature and direct attack on the separation of Whigs and Tories in English culture.

In Jonathan’s satire of Gulliver’s travels there are many devices of satire represented as well as in the film. For example, exaggeration is constantly used to represent to how society really is, it could be shown with the Yahoos who hated one another more than any other specie; this represents how human are the only who fight and destroy one another. Name calling was other technique is Swift’s creation, he put name to the place Gulliver traveled and all of them had an specific meaning either in another language or with symbolic allusions. Reversal attributes were used also to represent the opposite of the normal perspective of things. This is also related to changing a virtue to a vice, that is represented in he film with all the virtues of the different places he visited; for example, the principle virtues of the Houyhnhnms are their friendship and benevolence. However, that may mean that they were concerned more with the community than with their own personal advantages, even choosing their mates so as to promote the race as a whole.