GULLIVER'S TRAVELS

Each group should make a sub-page. Include your names on your page, and note the book with which you are working, the threads you trace through the book, the parts of the text that seem most relevant for your evaluation, and your assessment of the character Swift creates for Gulliver and the backdrop against which this character functions.

Book 4 Group H (Tiye Ialiyah Aton, Abigail Olshin)

Humanity, Social Hierarchy, Question of Intellect

Houyhnhnms are in disbelief upon learning that Yahoos (humans) have made them subservient and obedient creatures. He asked them to stop referring to him as a Yahoo as a derogatory term, because he doesn't want to be referred to as a "more civilized Yahoo".

Swift allows us to believe that the horses are unintelligent, until Gulliver arrives at this realization by speaking with them. In the course of the text, he slowly realizes that the Yahoos are human as well. Gulliver attempts to build a connection with them by trying to understand their language and informs them about European society. In his travels, Gulliver is constantly comparing the morality and customs of Europe to the various settlements that he encounters. The inversion of power dynamics in Book Four is different than the previous chapters because it forces the reader to question the validity of domesticating horses. The intellectual framework of Jonathan Swift is to satirize European society. Through this relationship between the Yahoos and Houyhnhnms Swift implies that Yahoos (or humans) are predisposed to greediness and corruption. Gulliver is a lone observer, but he is a representative of his country when he travels to these places. He attempts to remain morally upright and respectable, but I am not sure why Swift has characterized him this way.

Quote:

"I did indeed observe that the Yahoos were the only animals in this country subject to any diseases; which, however, were much fewer than horses have among us, and contracted, not by any ill-treatment they meet with, but by the nastiness and greediness of that sordid brute. Neither has their language any more than a general appellation for those maladies, which is borrowed from the name of the beast, and called hnea-yahoo, or Yahoo’s evil; and the cure prescribed is a mixture of their own dung and urine, forcibly put down the Yahoo’s throat. This I have since often known to have been taken with success, and do here freely recommend it to my countrymen for the public good, as an admirable specific against all diseases produced by repletion." (Book IV. Chapter VII).

Book One, Group A Book One, Group A (Adrianna & K)

Book Two. Group ?. (Dionne Croons)