Gulliver is pre-cast as a man who absorbs experience and cannot contemplate it. He reacts, but he does not judge properly or productively. Gulliver is at times a progressivist, at times a recidivist, and at times simply a fool. His ideas and his attitudes are literally all over the map. On some occasions he attacks European and English institutions as viciously corrupt; on others he praises his homeland and home continent as the supreme achievement of human civilization. At times he seems a steady and conservative voice for reason; at other times he seems a hapless, baffled modern crank. Often his observations are ironic and scathing, and just as often they are naive and commonplace. Moreover, given to boasting about his veracity, Gulliver says things in the Travels that are demonstrably untrue, and recognizable as such by any reader with half a brain. Gulliver wonders whether any humans might find him “so degenerated as to defend my veracity?” (p. 8). Just how degenerated does someone have to be to defend his veracity? We learn early that “it became a sort of proverb among his neighbours at Redriff, when any one affirmed a thing, to say, it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoken it” (p. 11). The only problem with the proverb is that it cuts two ways. Read ironically it could mean that any such person is a bare-faced liar. When Gulliver attacks the colonial practices and policies of European nations he absolves England because his nation sends abroad only people of “sober lives and conversations” (p. 293). But that is palpably untrue: England sends its thieves and derelicts abroad. When Gulliver says of the chicaneries of the infamous dead during his seance in the underworld in Luggnagg that “I do not in the least intend my own country in what I say upon this occasion” (p. 203), that is precisely what Swift intends.

Gulliver even contradicts himself. He describes his England to the King of Brobdingnag as “the seat of virtue, piety, honour and truth” (p. 112), and then in Houyhnhnmland he savages his homeland and begins “to think the honour of my own kind not worth managing” (pp. 257-258). After hearing the insults leveled at his English and European brethren by the King of Brobdingnag, Gulliver launches into a paean to the mayhem caused by modern armaments. The King berates him again:

The King was struck with horror at the description I had given of those terrible engines, and the proposal I had made. He was amazed how so impotent and groveling an insect as I (these were his expressions) could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner as to appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes of blood and desolation, which I had painted as the common effects of those destructive machines, whereof he said, some evil genius, enemy to mankind, must have been the first contriver. As for himself, he protested, that although few things delighted him so much as new discoveries in art or in nature, yet he would rather lose half his kingdom than be privy to such a secret, which he commanded, me, as I valued my life, never to mention any more (p. 139).

And what does Gulliver do in this instance? Almost stupidly, he complains of the King’s “narrow principles” (p. 139), and in these circumstances readers can only bemoan those principles Gulliver considers broad. Yet Gulliver at his best can display an almost eloquent satiric logic, as in his definition of war and soldiery to his Master Houyhnhnm: “A solider is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own species; who have never offended him, as possibly he can” (p.