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Pt. I:
Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon, is
shipwrecked at Lilliput where the inhabitants are six inches tall,
except their emperor who is taller by almost the "breadth of my nail"
than any of his court. Swift satirizes war by showing how seriously the
little people wage it, and has harsh words for the politicians and
government officials. The parties are known by the height of their
heels; a dispute over the question at which end an egg should be broken
is enough to plunge Lilliput into a civil war.
Pt. II:
In Brobdingnag, the natives are as
tall in proportion to Gulliver as the Lilliputians were short. He
engages in lengthy discussions with the king, who cannot understand the
lofty pretentions and vanities of the warfare; what he hears strikes
the king with horror.
Pt.
III:
In Laputa, men abandon all common
sense and concern themselves with speculative philosophy. In Lagado,
the flying island, Gulliver is amazed to see the scientists trying to
extract sunbeams from cucumbers.
Pt. IV:
Gulliver visits the land of the
Houyhnhnms, where intelligent horses are the masters and the Yahoos,
filthy, degenerate human beings, are the slaves. At last, Gulliver
returns to his wife and family, but finds them impossible to live with,
after having associated with the Houyhnhnms. The yahoos represented for
Gulliver the worst to which human beings could descend.
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