最短的：
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift's brilliant, satirical adventure, is a must-read. It is an appealing novel containing both, whimsy and wit. Swift seamlessly blends fact with fiction in this tale of an English ship surgeon. It pokes fun at the travelogues of this time period.
Lemuels Gulliver goes on four remarkable voyages across the globe and gets himself in several different situations. Symbolism, humor, and intelligence fill all three-hundred and eleven pages. The reader gets a good laugh all through the book at the expense of the main character. Gulliver has no sense of humor and adapts to every single environment that he is in. The book is well written masterpiece full of details. It is impossible to lose interest while reading each eventful chapter. The reader can never really predict what is next for the adventurous, gullible Gulliver.
Gulliver's travels is a novel that anyone who has an imagination would find entertaining and appealing. On the other hand, some members of the book club will find this book to ridiculous. This novel is not the typical satire, drama, comedy or adventure. Most books that we book worms read are serious or sometimes dark but this novel is neither. It is a fun read that doesn't take itself too seriously.
1
If you come to Gulliver’s Travels only knowing it as told to children, you could be as surprised as if you mistook a grizzly bear for a teddy. Despite it’s magical narrative, Swift’s black humour and acute satire are the book’s chief pleasures.
In the first voyage Gulliver is shipwrecked, waking up with his body and hair fastened to the ground. He is addressed in a strange language by a “human Creature not six inches high”, and then harmlessly attacked by a minute army. When he becomes a servant of the King of Lilliput the satire begins to bite. As we view the Lilliputians through Gulliver’s eyes, their wars and politics (which echo the events of Swift’s day) appear proportionately small-minded and vicious. Disillusioned with Lilliputian society, Gulliver soon seeks his escape.
In the second voyage the situation is reversed. Fortunately, the giants of Brobdingnag are for the most part kind-hearted, and Gulliver becomes deeply attached to them. Nevertheless, he is vulnerable not just to gigantic wasps, monkeys and cow-pats, but also to criticism of his own species. After questioning Gulliver about the history of Britain, the King is wounding: “I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth”.
The remaining voyages progressively show humanity’s wickedness in a starker light. In the final voyage a race of super-intelligent horses debate whether to exterminate the revolting human Yahoos who blight their island. The reader’s sympathies are somewhat mixed. By this point, Gulliver’s Travels has become less a satire than a fictional polemic, a forebear of The Time Machine, Brave New World and Animal Farm. Like the authors of these novels, Swift powerfully exploits his imaginative resources to ask unsettling questions about politics, science and human nature. It may not be suitable for kids, but it is literature of the very highest order.
2
Lemuel Gulliver tells his story of wanderlust and the marvelous countries he visited while travelling. His travels took place in the early 1700's when England was discovering and claiming lands around the world. Yet Gulliver did not try to claim the lands he discovered for Mother England.
Gulliver visits Lilliput, where the residents are only about six inches tall. His next journey takes him to Brobdingnag, where the residents are about sixty feet tall. In each of these places he is an oddity because of his size. His ship is overtaken by pirates on his next trip and he is rescued by the people on Laputa, an island that floats in the air above the world. On his last expedition he winds up shipwrecked in Houyhnhnm, a land where the intelligent species looks like our horses. The abridged version of his travels are amazing to anyone young or old.
The unabridged version of this story holds a lot of amusement for any politically savvy adult. Gulliver comments on each country's government and how it is superior to the English and European governments. He uses these countries to highlight all the problems within his own country. His description of lawyers still fits to a tea even today. He saterizes every level of government and human failings.
All too often I found myself tuning out as Gulliver continued to describe his government to another country's leader. Of course that other leader could not understand how anyone could live the way Gulliver depicted. Other times I would be laughing at how well Swift would show ourselves to us. The research school is beyond imagination. I also know why most dramatizations stop after Lilliput and Brobdingnag. Swift uses the last two countries to poke most of his barbs. The travels drag in my opinion when he keeps going on about the govermnments or actions of men. He uses satire like a stick to beat the reader over the head.
There were times I was sick of his (Gulliver's) self righteousness. He was always unfailingly polite (except to a dwarf in the giant land) and would never presume. He would listen to reason among all rulers of lands and try to explain his own countrymen logically. Swift draws Gulliver as extremely proper. By the end of the book Gulliver has withdrawn from society. Society hasn't lost anything by his isolation.