Gulliver As the Ingenuous Narrator. Essay

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Another technique Swift uses is the blame for praise or praise for blame. Find at least 2 examples of where Swift does this. What is he actually saying in each instance? Why does he use this technique?

Swift's use of irony is also evident when Gulliver an experience 'excellent' or other praiseworthy terms, when they are doing something abominable to him. Gulliver tries to be gracious when he is examined by 'wise men' who say absurd things about his appearance: "One of these virtuosi seemed to think that I might be an embryo, or abortive birth. But this opinion was rejected by the other two, who observed my limbs to be perfect and finished; and that I had lived several years, as it was manifest from my beard, the stumps whereof they plainly discovered through a magnifying glass. They would not allow me to be a dwarf, because my littleness was beyond all degrees of comparison; for the queen's favorite dwarf, the smallest ever known in that kingdom, was near thirty feet high." Gulliver always focuses on the 'good' even when the scientific theories advanced about him are patently in error.

In this anecdote, Swift also illustrates how the appearance of another culture can be misinterpreted as deformity or backwardness, when viewed through the gaze of ignorant 'wise men,' just as natives mistook Europeans for gods, and Europeans viewed the superior agricultural and sustainability of native ways of life as primitive.Excellence is thus a relative term, and just as Gulliver views the giants with horror, because he is defenseless, they laugh at his own race because they have power over him. 'Wisdom' and 'excellence' are in the eye of the beholder. Yet Gulliver does not seem to learn from the indignity of being a spectacle: when he returns to his own country, he turns what he takes back from the country of the giants into 'curiosities' as well, and acts as a wise man, displaying strange artifacts such as ordinary house flies as if they are wonderful: "These insects were as large as partridges: I took out their stings, found them an inch and a half long, and as sharp as needles. I carefully preserved them all; and having since shown them, with some other curiosities, in several parts of Europe, upon my return to England I gave three of them to Gresham College, and kept the….....