The Final Return to England: Reason and Dismay in Gulliver's Travels Bryan Fok 12th Grade

Satire is the use of humor, irony, and exaggeration to rip apart the flaws of people or society. In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift employs the art of satire that sometimes “borders on blasphemy” (Higgins) to “vex and entertain” (Higgins) the reader. To best get the point across, Swift writes with multiple types of readers in mind. The characterized reader, the one directly addressed by the narrator, is “often the butt of the joke because he does not understand” (Smith 40), while the implied reader, the hypothetical reader for whom the author writes, has peculiar qualities that “are necessary for a proper understanding of the text” (Smith 38). While the characterized reader seems to agree with everything Gulliver says, the implied reader is sometimes caught in a double bind, a situation in which the implied reader is confronted with two contradicting ideas, based on the irony of Gulliver’s words. The notion of a double bind is especially prevalent in the scene where Gulliver returns to his family after being expelled from Houynhnhnmland because the implied reader is faced between a choice of accepting humankind’s savage tendencies or of recognizing that humans are irrational creatures who will do anything to maintain a sense...