Gulliver as the Ingenuous Narrator.

¶ … Gulliver as the ingenuous narrator. Where does Swift use this technique and why? What does it allow him to do?

Swift is a satirist with a very broad sense of humor. To avoid making his humor seem offensive and abrasive, Swift uses Gulliver's naive voice to soften some of the satiric blows he strikes with his wit. Swift's descriptions of Gulliver's encounters with the race of giants are clearly a satire of European encounters with individuals of other races, but Gulliver's calm and relatively gentle tone towards the people who prod him and poke at him add humor to his depiction: "The farmer, by this time, was convinced I must be a rational creature. ...he called his wife, and showed me to her; but she screamed and ran back, as women in England do at the sight of a toad or a spider. However, when she had a while seen my behavior, and how well I observed the signs her husband made, she was soon reconciled, and by degrees grew extremely tender of me." Despite the fact that he is transported in a handkerchief and cannot initially communicate with is captors, Gulliver still shows gentility and grace, even while Swift shows the horrors of being turned into a 'curiosity' when one is physically powerless.

Gulliver painstakingly tries to show the race of giants in a positive light, despite the discomforts he is subject to under their control. Gulliver's matter-of-fact delivery about his experience as a vulnerable captive who is made a spectacle of by his captors makes the fantastic experience seem more realistic, and more humorous yet horrible because Gulliver is trying to put a brave face upon being treated like a savage animal or a creature in a zoo. Swift's cool tone makes the experience bearable to read, although taken on a literal level, his experiences such as being treated like a doll by the daughter of the home is demeaning and infantilizing. Gulliver is physically threatened because of his small size yet he says: "I hope the gentle reader will excuse me for dwelling on these and the like particulars, which, however insignificant they may appear to groveling vulgar minds, yet will certainly help a philosopher to enlarge his thoughts and imagination, and apply them to the benefit of public as well as private life, which was my sole design in presenting this and other accounts of my travels to the world; wherein I have been chiefly studious of truth, without affecting any ornaments of learning or of style."

Another technique Swift uses is the blame for praise or praise for blame. Find at least 2 examples of where Swift does this. What is he actually saying in each instance? Why does he use this technique?

Swift's use of irony is also evident when Gulliver an experience 'excellent' or other praiseworthy terms, when they are doing something abominable to him. Gulliver tries to be gracious when he is examined by 'wise men' who say absurd things about his appearance: "One of these virtuosi seemed to think that I might be an embryo, or abortive birth. But this opinion was rejected by the other two, who observed my limbs to be perfect and finished; and that I had lived several years, as it was manifest from my beard, the stumps whereof they plainly discovered through a magnifying glass. They would not allow me to be a dwarf, because my littleness was beyond all degrees of comparison; for the queen's favorite dwarf, the smallest ever known in that kingdom, was near thirty feet high." Gulliver always focuses on the 'good' even when the scientific theories advanced about him are patently in error.