Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

Lemuel Gulliver, doctor on a merchant ship, is shipwrecked on the island of Lilliput, where everything, beginning by the inhabitants, is large a fifteenth of persons and objects we know. In the second part instead Gulliver visits Brobdingnag, where the ratio is turned upside down and where the doctor becomes the of the King's daughter, who keeps him between her playthings. In the third part Gulliver visits Laputa and the continent that has Lagado as capital, where the satire is addressed against philosophers, historians and inventors. In the island of Glubdubdrib, then, Gulliver evokes the shadows of the great man of the antiquity and from their answers he discovers their bad habits and meanness; while among the immortal Struldbrug, he notices that the largest sadness for the man would be the perspective of not giving an end to the tedium vitae. In the fourth part then, the virtuous easiness of the Houyhnhnm horses contrasts with the nauseous brutality of the Yahoo, beasts with a human aspect.