Time and its progress are terrifying for Swift. Against time there is neither right nor wrong, neither ancient nor modern. Time is that condition where the best only gets worse.

Swift’s satire sets itself up on another key general premise: Individuals assimilate more easily than they discriminate. Throughout the Travels, Gulliver’s powers of judgment fail almost in direct relation to his need to become part of the cultures he encounters. In Lilliput he obsesses over paltry honors; in Brobdingnag he cannot bear to look in a mirror because his smallness gave him “so despicable a conceit of my self” (pp. 151-152); in Laputa he is so overeager to participate in senseless and absurd projects that the spirit of paranoid politics takes over and he offers his own schemes for ferreting out conspiracies from a suspect’s stool; in Houyhnhnmland he begins to prance and whinny like a horse; back home in England he can hardly bear the proximity of his wife as he walks around with tobacco or lavender up his nose to avoid the smell of his species.

Earlier in the adventures Gulliver had himself articulated the assimilative bent of the satire when he comments on his scare at the hands of a huge monkey in Brobdingnag: “This made me reflect how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavour doing himself honour among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him” (pp. 127-128). It is precisely because Gulliver tries so hard to assimilate in the places to which he travels that he feels so displaced at home. In explaining his disorientation at the smallness of the folk back in England after Brobdingnag—“an instance of the great power of habit and prejudice” (p. 153)—Gulliver reveals one of the satiric secrets of the Travels. By wishing to become the things he describes, Gulliver loses the perspective and judgment that allow him any sense of contentment in remaining who he is.

In the last voyage of the Travels, Gulliver finds himself completely comfortable for the first time in his adventures among horses—“I enjoyed perfect health of body and tranquillity of mind” (p. 275). It is not so surprising that Swift chooses horses for Gulliver’s utopian, idealized civilization. Swift himself liked horses. He spent considerable time with them, knew their habits, and generally found himself happy if not happiest in their presence. But he never labored under the delusion that they were anything but animals. Gulliver does. Significantly, Gulliver responds to the kind Portuguese captain who picks him up after his last voyage as the Houyhnhnms responded to him: “At last I descended to treat him like an animal which had some little portion of reason” (p. 285). In other words, Gulliver thinks of himself as a horse. His descent in this instance mirrors the assimilative process Swift has carefully set up throughout.

The Character of Lemuel Gulliver

Gulliver is a decidedly inconsistent figure in the Travels. Indeed, there are several Gullivers, each capable of or subject to different levels of irony and each capable of or subject to different levels of satiric abuse. At various times Swift makes Gulliver’s responses shallow and unreliable as part of the fictional design, or he has little care for design at all and allows Gulliver to change in shrewdness and sensibility subject by subject. The second option, of course, can be a complex form of the first because it fits in with procedures Swift followed beginning with his early satire, A Tale of a Tub, in which the very premise of the piece is to keep the reader unsure and unsteady about the legitimacy and even mental stability of the speaking voice.

There are odd fissures in Gulliver’s character very early in the adventures. When he has to find a place to dump his excrement while confined as a giant in Lilliput, Gulliver complains that he would not have brought the matter up at all “if I had not thought it necessary to justify my character in point of cleanliness to the world; which I am told some of my maligners have been pleased, upon this and other occasions, to call in question” (p. 35). What could Gulliver have done in England to collect maligners on this or any occasion? Or do we encounter a shakier Gulliver, a Gulliver not only uncomfortable in his own skin, but one about whom his neighbors might have something less than a sterling opinion? By the end of the Travels, Gulliver even lets it drop that in the interstices of his adventures he has spent some time in lawsuits against his neighbors, the details of which he never reveals but for which he employed “advocates in vain, upon some injustices that had been done me” (p. 249). When he takes his leave in Houyhnhnmland his master horse lets him kiss his hoof: “Detractors are pleased to think it improbable, that so illustrious a person should descend to give so great a mark of distinction to a creature so inferior as I” (p. 281). The scene, if one simply imagines it, is absurd enough, but what detractors could Gulliver be talking about? Certainly, from the offense Gulliver takes in this instance, any detractors he could produce would have to be more deluded than he.

Swift finds ways of telling his readers again and again to be wary of Gulliver’s narrating sensibilities.