Blog #6

Ross Reed

2-28-11

Gulliver’s Travels Come to a Halt.. Finally. 

Gulliver has found his dream world which is full of happiness and without corruption, only problem is that his fantasy land is full of talking horses and barbaric human creatures covered in poop.  

What Gulliver loved so much about the talking horses, other wise known as Houyhnhnms, was that they had no understanding of war, lying, money, opinions, and disease. They were an untainted culture in terms of their views.  The reason he appreciated these values so much is because he has been traveling so much and seen so many cultures that he viewed as dysfunctional, so he can no longer go back to sanity. I like to think of it as a kind of shell shock, as if Gulliver was a soldier shipped off to war and he was in a different world with death all around him and when his time is up he goes back to normal society but he cannot adjust because he has seen too much corruption.  

It is clear to us that Gulliver has lost all touch of reality. He has dehumanized the yahoo’s and used their own skin to build a boat. The Gulliver we first knew at the beginning of this book would never do such a thing to any creature. Also, when Gulliver eventually finds his way home he realized he is disgusted with just about every aspect of his people, including his family. 

“My Wife and Family received me with great Surprise and Joy, because they concluded me certainly dead; but I must confess the sight of them filled me only with Hatred, Disgust and Contempt, and the more by reflecting on the near Alliance I had to them.” ( Gulliver’s Travels pg.265)

He ends up spending the majority of his days with his horses instead of his family. My conclusion on what his final thoughts were about his journeys is that Gulliver has seen what the true world was like and he was ashamed to be alike any of the cultures he saw, so he isolated himself away.