Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; our class’s latest victim to be viciously ripped apart word by word, in order to free the deeper meaning trapped inside its pages and allow it to enrich our minds.
When we left class on Thursday, it was our opinion (for only the author knows the true meaning of his or her work) that Swift was poking fun of the two sides of human nature: Reason and Passion. We determined that the Houyhnhnms represented reason and the Yahoos represented passion. After making this distinction, we concluded that neither society is one we would chose to live in, for, like one of my classmates very insightfully stated, “It takes two legs to stand on.”
However, I have a problem with this. Yes, we as a class determined that we would not want to take part in neither the Houyhnhnms’ nor the Yahoos’ lifestyle and I fully agree with this. However, what of Gulliver? Dose he not get a say in this, his own story?
When we come to the end of Gulliver’s voyages, he is back in England with his wife and child, and he is completely miserable. Gulliver rejects society, his own society, and chooses to keep himself in the company of horses. Thus, a question, and the question that has been nagging at me, is why? Why dose he choose this for himself? Or, a better question, why has Swift chosen this ending for his character?
Well, my thoughts are these. People are not intuitively reasonable, we instead are naturally passionate creatures. Reason is a learn behavior, taught to us not only from our parents and teachers, but also from our own experiences. It is reason that controls our passions, making our society a more peaceful place to live. After all, how peaceful would our lives be if we continuously seek out our passions; get into fight because we feel rage, steal because we feel jealously, etc. If we did not learn reason, our world would be a very chaotic place to live.
That is why I believe the reason (no pun intended) that Gulliver so much desires the Houyhnhnm’s lifestyle is because peacefully living is the result of reasonable actions. It is this message that I believe Swift was trying to also put across. Think of where he is at, Swift is living in Ireland during a famine and the Irish, knowing there is not enough food to go around, keep making lots of babies. Do you believe this is the cause of reasonable thought (perhaps they took “A Modest Proposal” a little too seriously) or the result of passion?
We use reason to control our passion in order to live a peaceful life. Even if the reasonable thing to do is live without so much reason in our lives! While I believe reason brings harmony, passion brings joy. With the absents of passion, that is a life not worth living.
I am sorry about the length! Please give me feedback! If you like it that's great! If you didn't that's even better!
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