UGH! has anyone done an analytical essay on gulliver's travels or candide?

nope. sowwie. sparknotes, maybe?

YOU STILL HAVEN'T STARTED DOING YOUR PAPER?
I GAVE YOU HELPFUL LINKS, YO!

<font size=5>pro crast ination</font>

i'm reading all of the stories and i'm so indecisive it's not even funny!
i'm thinking of just reading them tonight and writing it all after i've slept on it, THEN emailing it to the teacher at the last moment!

Originally posted by trykristin
i'm thinking of just reading them tonight and writing it all after i've slept on it, THEN emailing it to the teacher at the last moment!

i used to do that all the time in high school. i'd write the paper right before class in my free period, hehe. always got the best grades when i did that.

I really enjoyed both of those books, but I don't feel like doing an in-depth analysis of either.

Originally posted by mewl


i used to do that all the time in high school. i'd write the paper right before class in my free period, hehe. always got the best grades when i did that.

:idea:

Themes, Motifs & Symbols
Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
Might Versus Right
Gulliver’s Travels implicitly poses the question of whether physical power or moral righteousness should be the governing factor in social life. Gulliver experiences the advantages of physical might both as one who has it, as a giant in Lilliput where he can defeat the Blefuscudian navy by virtue of his immense size, and as one who does not have it, as a miniature visitor to Brobdingnag where he is harassed by the hugeness of everything from insects to household pets. His first encounter with another society is one of entrapment, when he is physically tied down by the Lilliputians; later, in Brobdingnag, he is enslaved by a farmer. He also observes physical force used against others, as with the Houyhnhnms’ chaining up of the Yahoos.





But alongside the use of physical force, there are also many claims to power based on moral correctness. The whole point of the egg controversy that has set Lilliput against Blefuscu is not merely a cultural difference but, instead, a religious and moral issue related to the proper interpretation of a passage in their holy book. This difference of opinion seems to justify, in their eyes at least, the warfare it has sparked. Similarly, the use of physical force against the Yahoos is justified for the Houyhnhnms by their sense of moral superiority: they are cleaner, better behaved, and more rational. But overall, the novel tends to show that claims to rule on the basis of moral righteousness are often just as arbitrary as, and sometimes simply disguises for, simple physical subjugation. The Laputans keep the lower land of Balnibarbi in check through force because they believe themselves to be more rational, even though we might see them as absurd and unpleasant. Similarly, the ruling elite of Balnibarbi believes itself to be in the right in driving Lord Munodi from power, although we perceive that Munodi is the rational party. Claims to moral superiority are, in the end, as hard to justify as the random use of physical force to dominate others.

The Individual Versus Society
Like many narratives about voyages to nonexistent lands, Gulliver’s Travels explores the idea of utopia—an imaginary model of the ideal community. The idea of a utopia is an ancient one, going back at least as far as the description in Plato’s Republic of a city-state governed by the wise and expressed most famously in English by Thomas More’s Utopia. Swift nods to both works in his own narrative, though his attitude toward utopia is much more skeptical, and one of the main aspects he points out about famous historical utopias is the tendency to privilege the collective group over the individual. The children of Plato’s Republic are raised communally, with no knowledge of their biological parents, in the understanding that this system enhances social fairness. Swift has the Lilliputians similarly raise their offspring collectively, but its results are not exactly utopian, since Lilliput is torn by conspiracies, jealousies, and backstabbing.

The Houyhnhnms also practice strict family planning, dictating that the parents of two females should exchange a child with a family of two males, so that the male-to-female ratio is perfectly maintained. Indeed, they come closer to the utopian ideal than the Lilliputians in their wisdom and rational simplicity. But there is something unsettling about the Houyhnhnms’ indistinct personalities and about how they are the only social group that Gulliver encounters who do not have proper names. Despite minor physical differences, they are all so good and rational that they are more or less interchangeable, without individual identities. In their absolute fusion with their society and lack of individuality, they are in a sense the exact opposite of Gulliver, who has hardly any sense of belonging to his native society and exists only as an individual eternally wandering the seas. Gulliver’s intense grief when forced to leave the Houyhnhnms may have something to do with his longing for union with a community in which he can lose his human identity. In any case, such a union is impossible for him, since he is not a horse, and all the other societies he visits make him feel alienated as well.

Gulliver’s Travels could in fact be described as one of the first novels of modern alienation, focusing on an individual’s repeated failures to integrate into societies to which he does not belong. England itself is not much of a homeland for Gulliver, and, with his surgeon’s business unprofitable and his father’s estate insufficient to support him, he may be right to feel alienated from it. He never speaks fondly or nostalgically about England, and every time he returns home, he is quick to leave again. Gulliver never complains explicitly about feeling lonely, but the embittered and antisocial misanthrope we see at the end of the novel is clearly a profoundly isolated individual. Thus, if Swift’s satire mocks the excesses of communal life, it may also mock the excesses of individualism in its portrait of a miserable and lonely Gulliver talking to his horses at home in England.

The Limits of Human Understanding
The idea that humans are not meant to know everything and that all understanding has a natural limit is important in Gulliver’s Travels. Swift singles out theoretical knowledge in particular for attack: his portrait of the disagreeable and self-centered Laputans, who show blatant contempt for those who are not sunk in private theorizing, is a clear satire against those who pride themselves on knowledge above all else. Practical knowledge is also satirized when it does not produce results, as in the academy of Balnibarbi, where the experiments for extracting sunbeams from cucumbers amount to nothing. Swift insists that there is a realm of understanding into which humans are simply not supposed to venture. Thus his depictions of rational societies, like Brobdingnag and Houyhnhnmland, emphasize not these people’s knowledge or understanding of abstract ideas but their ability to live their lives in a wise and steady way.

The Brobdingnagian king knows shockingly little about the abstractions of political science, yet his country seems prosperous and well governed. Similarly, the Houyhnhnms know little about arcane subjects like astronomy, though they know how long a month is by observing the moon, since that knowledge has a practical effect on their well-being. Aspiring to higher fields of knowledge would be meaningless to them and would interfere with their happiness. In such contexts, it appears that living a happy and well-ordered life seems to be the very thing for which Swift thinks knowledge is useful.

Swift also emphasizes the importance of self-understanding. Gulliver is initially remarkably lacking in self-reflection and self-awareness. He makes no mention of his emotions, passions, dreams, or aspirations, and he shows no interest in describing his own psychology to us. Accordingly, he may strike us as frustratingly hollow or empty, though it is likely that his personal emptiness is part of the overall meaning of the novel. By the end, he has come close to a kind of twisted self-knowledge in his deranged belief that he is a Yahoo. His revulsion with the human condition, shown in his shabby treatment of the generous Don Pedro, extends to himself as well, so that he ends the novel in a thinly disguised state of self-hatred. Swift may thus be saying that self-knowledge has its necessary limits just as theoretical knowledge does, and that if we look too closely at ourselves we might not be able to carry on living happily.

Motifs
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Excrement
While it may seem a trivial or laughable motif, the recurrent mention of excrement in Gulliver’s Travels actually has a serious philosophical significance in the narrative. It symbolizes everything that is crass and ignoble about the human body and about human existence in general, and it obstructs any attempt to view humans as wholly spiritual or mentally transcendent creatures. Since the Enlightenment culture of eighteenth-century England tended to view humans optimistically as noble souls rather than vulgar bodies, Swift’s emphasis on the common filth of life is a slap in the face of the philosophers of his day. Thus, when Gulliver finds himself up to his waist in cow dung in Lilliput, or when Brobdingnagian flies defecate on his meals, or when the scientist in Lagado works to transform excrement back into food, we are reminded how very little human reason has to do with everyday existence. Swift suggests that the human condition in general is dirtier and lowlier than we might like to believe it is.

Foreign Languages
Gulliver appears to be a gifted linguist, knowing at least the basics of several European languages and even a fair amount of ancient Greek. This knowledge serves him well, as he is able to disguise himself as a Dutchman in order to facilitate his entry into Japan, which at the time only admitted the Dutch. But even more important, his linguistic gifts allow him to learn the languages of the exotic lands he visits with a dazzling speed and, thus, gain access to their culture quickly. He learns the languages of the Lilliputians, the Brobdingnagians, and even the neighing tongue of the Houyhnhnms. He is meticulous in recording the details of language in his narrative, often giving the original as well as the translation. One would expect that such detail would indicate a cross-cultural sensitivity, a kind of anthropologist’s awareness of how things vary from culture to culture. Yet surprisingly, Gulliver’s mastery of foreign languages generally does not correspond to any real interest in cultural differences. He compares any of the governments he visits to that of his native England, and he rarely even speculates on how or why cultures are different at all. Thus, his facility for translation does not indicate a culturally comparative mind, and we are perhaps meant to yearn for a narrator who is a bit less able to remember the Brobdingnagian word for “lark” and better able to offer a more illuminating kind of cultural analysis.

Clothing
Critics have noted the extraordinary attention that Gulliver pays to clothes throughout his journeys. Every time he gets a rip in his shirt or is forced to adopt some native garment to replace one of his own, he recounts the clothing details with great precision. We are told how his pants are falling apart in Lilliput, so that as the army marches between his legs they get quite an eyeful. We are informed about the mouse skin he wears in Brobdingnag, and how the finest silks of the land are as thick as blankets on him. In one sense, these descriptions are obviously an easy narrative device with which Swift can chart his protagonist’s progression from one culture to another: the more ragged his clothes become and the stranger his new wardrobe, the farther he is from the comforts and conventions of England. His journey to new lands is also thus a journey into new clothes. When he is picked up by Don Pedro after his fourth voyage and offered a new suit of clothes, Gulliver vehemently refuses, preferring his wild animal skins. We sense that Gulliver may well never fully reintegrate into European society.

But the motif of clothing carries a deeper, more psychologically complex meaning as well. Gulliver’s intense interest in the state of his clothes may signal a deep-seated anxiety about his identity, or lack thereof. He does not seem to have much selfhood: one critic has called him an “abyss,” a void where an individual character should be. If clothes make the man, then perhaps Gulliver’s obsession with the state of his wardrobe may suggest that he desperately needs to be fashioned as a personality. Significantly, the two moments when he describes being naked in the novel are two deeply troubling or humiliating experiences: the first when he is the boy toy of the Brobdingnagian maids who let him cavort nude on their mountainous breasts, and the second when he is assaulted by an eleven-year-old Yahoo girl as he bathes. Both incidents suggest more than mere prudery. Gulliver associates nudity with extreme vulnerability, even when there is no real danger present—a pre-teen girl is hardly a threat to a grown man, at least in physical terms. The state of nudity may remind Gulliver of how nonexistent he feels without the reassuring cover of clothing.

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/gulliver/themes.html

Originally posted by trykristin
:idea:

you naughty girl. good luck, darlin' :)

I wrote one on Gulliver's Travels in 12th grade. Not a good time.

I hope your paper doesn't turn out like you post on netphoria.

OMG THEN GULLIVER GOT TIED UP BY ALL THESE TINY LITTLE MEN AND OH MY GOD THIS ISN'T ABOUT ME! DID YOU KNOW THAT NIMROD KEEPS POSTING MY ASS ON NETPHORIA??? WHAT? YOU DIDN'T SEE IT THE FIRST TIME!? LET ME REFERENCE THE LATEST THREAD WHERE MY ASS WAS POSTED. OH MY GOD I WAS SO EMBARRASSED BUT I KEEP BRINGING IT UP EVERY TIME I POST. OH HEY, DID I MENTION THAT MY ASS IS ON THE INTERNET?

Originally posted by meow
I hope your paper doesn't turn out like you post on netphoria.

OMG THEN GULLIVER GOT TIED UP BY ALL THESE TINY LITTLE MEN AND OH MY GOD THIS ISN'T ABOUT ME! DID YOU KNOW THAT NIMROD KEEPS POSTING MY ASS ON NETPHORIA??? WHAT? YOU DIDN'T SEE IT THE FIRST TIME!? LET ME REFERENCE THE LATEST THREAD WHERE MY ASS WAS POSTED. OH MY GOD I WAS SO EMBARRASSED BUT I KEEP BRINGING IT UP EVERY TIME I POST. OH HEY, DID I MENTION THAT MY ASS IS ON THE INTERNET?

you're such a fucking retard. all you do is jump on the bandwagon. when people liked me you were parading around your affection for me, and now that it's popular to hate me, you exclaim with all your energies how you hate me too.

get a fucking life. you disgust me.

Originally posted by meow
...

I have an 8-page analytical essay on Gulliver's Travels and how the book can relate to the late 1900s. I got an A+ on that pain-in-the-ass paper. I was proud. :)

Originally posted by trykristin
when people liked me

Originally posted by trykristin


you're such a fucking retard. all you do is jump on the bandwagon. when people liked me you were parading around your affection for me, and now that it's popular to hate me, you exclaim with all your energies how you hate me too.

get a fucking life. you disgust me.

If you make it easy to push your buttons, people will keep pushing said buttons.

When you first came on, I gave you the benefit of the doubt. Then your ass got posted and it was all "OMG LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME." That disgusts me.

Originally posted by Hillzy


;)

Originally posted by meow


If you make it easy to push your buttons, people will keep pushing said buttons.

When you first came on, I gave you the benefit of the doubt. Then your ass got posted and it was all "OMG LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME." That disgusts me.

what relevance does this have with my english paper? please be more mature and stop entering threads just to flame. k?

Originally posted by trykristin


what relevance does this have with my english paper? please be more mature and stop entering threads just to flame. k?

YOU are lecturing ME about maturity?

a'ight.

<FONT SIZE=23523532>HERE WE GO AGAIN!</FONT>

it's ok you guys! i'm zoning out!

I answered the question like a good little poster and got ignored. Kickass!

Originally posted by sppunk
I answered the question like a good little poster and got ignored. Kickass!

wha'd you expect?

Typically when one asks a question, there is a reason thus wanting more information.

Unless you're MonteLDS's clone.

Originally posted by sppunk
Typically when one asks a question, there is a reason thus wanting more information.

Unless you're MonteLDS's clone.

My monte question impression:
OMG HOW MANY OF YOU HAD A BOWEL MOVEMENT TODAY?

Originally posted by sppunk
Typically when one asks a question, there is a reason thus wanting more information.

Unless you're MonteLDS's clone.

k, well i need themes here. i have so many running through my head that i can't think and then those that are running through my head probably don't have enough evidence or material to equal 5 pages

i hate that kid so much.

5 pages = 1250 words = easy. If you have ideas.

i don't remember gullivers travels and i didn't read the other one.

eh, it's ok! i have 12 hours!

Originally posted by trykristin


k, well i need themes here. i have so many running through my head that i can't think and then those that are running through my head probably don't have enough evidence or material to equal 5 pages

Good luck with that. We can save a lot of heartache if we just get this one fact out in the open real quick: no one on Netphoria will do your homework for you.

Originally posted by sppunk


Good luck with that. We can save a lot of heartache if we just get this one fact out in the open real quick: no one on Netphoria will do your homework for you.

OMG WHATS 2+2???

Originally posted by sppunk


Good luck with that. We can save a lot of heartache if we just get this one fact out in the open real quick: no one on Netphoria will do your homework for you.

that's right sppunk! good job! i just thought someone might have an interesting idea or theme or something. THEN i was gonna let you guys read it when i was done!!!! isn't that exciting!!?!?!!

i really just needed a break from reading.

trykristin said this about you: she's the type to run up and
kick a dead animal for a laugh right?


HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

wow, you really know nothing about me!

Originally posted by meow
trykristin said this about you: she's the type to run up and
kick a dead animal for a laugh right?


HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

wow, you really know nothing about me!

listen, just stop it.

Originally posted by trykristin


listen, just stop it.

omg you tell me to stop something, and you expect me to stop?


:rofl:

+ 1

Originally posted by trykristin
+ 1

I totally reported that to a moderator.