Jonathan Swift: A Satirical Voice Against Human Folly
Classified in Philosophy and ethics
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Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was a member of the Church of England, the Irish branch of the Anglican Church. He was a conservative by nature and promoted the general decay of Christianity. The truth had been corrupted by men who had behave like Yahoos (Gulliver’s Travels). He believed that Man God had created an animal which was not inherently rational but only capable of behaving reasonably. It is our tendency to disappoint that he rages against. God created a monster that only have reason in some occasions. His works embody his attempts to maintain order and reason in a world which tended towards chaos and disorder and his belief was that Ireland was already constitutionally independent. He felt that Ireland was been conquered and had to stop being. A Modest Proposal is equally directed against the Anglo-Irish group to which Swift himself belonged. The “Proposal” has sometimes been read as a satire of the social and economic tracts whose form it mimics. In A Modest Proposal all Irish are included and he exposed himself in defence of Irish interests and is till honoured in Ireland as a great patriot. His understanding of human nature is profound. In his opinion, human nature is seriously flawed. To better human life Englishmen is needed. In A Modest Proposal we can find four parts and the last one is an anticipation of the objection of the proposal.
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, commonly known as Gulliver’s Travels (1726), is a prose satire by Jonathan Swift, that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of the “travellers’ tales” literary subgenre. It has four voyages, A Voyage to Lilliput, A Voyage to Brobdingnag, A Voyage to Laputa and A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms.
In 1735 an Irish publisher, George Faulkner, printed a set of Swift's works, Volume III of which was Gulliver's Travels. As revealed in Faulkner's "Advertisement to the Reader", Faulkner had access to an annotated copy of Motte's work by "a friend of the author" (generally believed to be Swift's friend Charles Ford) which reproduced most of the manuscript without Motte's amendments, the original manuscript having been destroyed.
In GT, Swift wanted human beings to reconsider the importance of reason. Gulliver, for example, proudly tells the king of Brobdingnag about gunpowder, the scientific invention that will allow him to rule the world, but the horrified king brings him down to size, and calls him a “grovelling insect”. The giant is shocked that something so small and insignificant could take delight in cruelty and destruction. In GT he satirizes extreme Protestants and Catholics alike. The Lilliputian Big Enders and Little Enders each want to exterminate the other because of the way they break their eggs. Finally, passions and pride control human beings, and reason is limited. The Lilliputians show the same cold, mathematical logic as the most reasonable narrator of “A Modest Proposal” when they decide to get rid of Gulliver by blinding him and then starving him to make his corpse easier to dispose of. They live out human feeling finding new worlds of living.