Gulliver's Travels
...expressed these feelings in Books I and II, Voyage to Lilliput and Voyage to Brobdingnag, respectively. In the Voyage to Lilliput, the Emperor fought a war over the “correct” way to break an egg. The people of Lilliput choose to break their eggs over the small end while their Belfuscan counterparts cracked their eggs on the big end. The decision came about when the Lilliputian king nicked his finger on the big end. He called for a new law which stated that all Lilliputian people were to break their egg on the small end. Swift, through Gulliver, a fictional character, portrayed his contempt for the way England declared war over trivialities. Another example of this pettiness was in Book II (Brobdingnag), Gulliver finds himself stranded on an island with Giants. He is found by a farmer and exploited as a means for making money. This shows that humans use people that are different from them just because they are different. This, one could say, is an example of being petty and irrational. Another flaw Swift pointed out was the cleanliness, or in this case lack thereof, displayed by humans, Europeans in particular. One example of this was shown in Book II (Brobdingnag) when Gulliver was forced to watch the gargantuan Maids of Honor undress and relieve themselves. Gulliver, who is significantly smaller in size compared to the giants, sees all of the flaws, blemishes, pimples and blackheads invisible to eye of the giant people. He takes in their pungent odor from afar, which thoroughly disgusted him, though the odor went unnoticed by the giants. Another example of this uncleanliness was in Book IV (Houyhnhnms and Yahoos), in this section, Swift expresses his contempt for European and humanities lack of cleanliness by portraying the human like characters to be wild, untamed, and unruly. The Yahoos live in the woods and are covered by thick layers of mud and dirt. Their animal counterparts, the Houyhnhnms, however, are clean and the superiors of the Yahoos. Gulliver is immediately appalled by the Yahoos, and this serves to make him view humans as disgusting once he has further decided that humans and Yahoos are equivalent. One could say that Gulliver believing this is Swifts personal belief showing through his fictional character. The third and final flaw Swift brought to his audiences attention was the way humans mistreat one another. This was explained in Book II (Brobdingnag) as well as Book III (Laputa). In Book II, after being exploited by the farmer, Gulliver was sold to the Queen as a plaything and treated as such. When Gulliver was shown to the Queen’s court, he was looked upon as weird by most people. But the court Dwarf saw Gulliver as an intrusion. The dwarf who, before Gulliver’s arrival was the kingdom’...