The Search For Satire

As I read Gulliver’s Travels I started to get worried about something, which, in all honesty, makes me doubt whether or not I am good with literature. Do I understand satire? Does parody make any sense to me? I would love to think that it does because that makes me feel like a cultured person. However I had the same feeling that I have now as I read Inferno, part of The Divine Comedy. I cannot lie by saying that it inspired laughter in me. I did not see almost any comedic sense on this work. With the present book I have laughed and I have seen parody, but some times pages keep on going on and I find nothing that could be a parody. This makes me doubt if the problem lies with me because I am sure that other people find something that makes fun of something else every two minutes. I felt compelled, thus, to share some of the things that I found funny in hopes of being corrected if I am wrong and learning more about satire and close reading.

The first obvious irony can be seen when the six inch Lilliput’s imprison the six foot Gulliver. One thing that I found very funny was the description of a watch that was made by the two Lilliputian officers in the inventory to the King. Here they say that they think that it is the object of his worship because “he seldom did any Thing without consulting it…he said that it pointed out the time for every action of his life.” (Swift, 14) I thought that this was funny because if you have never heard of a watch and someone tells you that this is what it is for, then you would probably get the impression that they are talking about a God because it seems so important. However we know that they are describing an apparatus that tells time, and I think that the parody is at society that pays more attention to time and lets that rule our life rather than to a God. We are, in a way, giving more importance to a material object than to a deity which is a little absurd, or at least it was in the time were the church was the center of life or had been recently. Another thing that I thought was a parody was the way the people of court got their jobs and their positions, by dancing on ropes and playing a game that sounded like how low can you go. I think this was mocking the nepotistic system that is applied at courts and how the King would chose whomever he liked for jobs that should be chosen by a meticulous process. Then another part that I liked and laughed was where he described how Gulliver had to swear loyalty, “hold my right foot in my left hand, to place the middle finger of my right hand on the crown of my head, and my thumb on the tip of my right ear.” (Swift, 20) Here the pure absurdity of the way we use gestures and movements, such as the locking of pinkies, to seal a deal is shown to us because we think upon reading the description that the are crazy but it is really no different to what we do. The other very direct mock is when he describes the fact that the small island might go to war with their neighbor, Blefuscu, and the cause is explained. It all started because one island likes to break their eggs form the large side while the other does it from the small side. Do eggs even have a smaller side? It is foolish to go to war over such a silly subject and what Swift is doing is mocking the silly reasons and excuses that countries use to go to war with each other and showing that they sound just like this unreasonable cause. As I go on I will try to analyze more of the satire, and I hope by the end of the book I will have found many, many more.