Question: Evaluate the Fourth voyage of Gulliver Travels.
Answer: The fourth voyage of Gulliver's Travels is the culmination of Swift's lifelong attaches on the prices of man, especially the pride which convinces him that he com live by the light of Lau-aided reason. It a clear, both from the satire and the religious writings, that Swift way Hostile to all doctrines of the natural self-sufficiency of man and the Eouth voyage of Gulliver's Travels embodies that hostility. But while the object of attack is established, it is not immediately clear, from the voyage itself whether any positive position is implied in the Houyhnhnms or in other characters.
The ambiguity of the Fourth voyage lies not in the yahoos, but in the positions of Gulliver and, especially, of the Houyhnhnms. The Yahoos, clearly, embody the negative intention and are to be condemned. They closely resemble human beings in their physical appearance. In fact, Yahoos are to represent the irrational human beings Gulliver describes them as filthy and the most unreachable of all brutes, with the strongest disposition of mischief. Further, he points to their gluttony, their witness for liquor and shining stores, and their susceptibility to live. He also mentions the lustful nature of the female yahoos and the tricks by means of which they lure the male yahoos to satisfy their lust the entire description of the yahoos is applicable to human beings and is depicted to satirize the irrationality and the lustful desires of human beings. Thus the position of yahoos in the Fourth voyage is condemnable and cannot, together be regarded as a consistent satiric norm against which the moral and political vagaries of eighteen century England are to be measured.
The function of the Houyhnhnms may be to present an ideal of the true life of reason to be admired even if unattainable, and to be constructed with the yahoos to chasten the pride of the lump of deformity, man, by shog.... him the vanity of his pretensions. But if swift did intend the Houyhnhnms to stand as an ideal contrast, he has badly mismanaged the matter. The Houyhnhnms do not startle readers as altogether admirable beings indeed they are sometimes aboard and even repellant, and we are disgusted by Gulliver's exaggerated devotion to them. The dispassion arguments of the assemble, for instance, about the nature and future fate of Gulliver and the yahoos, Show the character is and unpleasant cordless of the Houyhnhnms race, while Gulliver master displays thin equally characteristic self, satisfaction carried hare to the point of absurdity when he criticizes Gulliver's physical quantities. Gulliver tells how his master interrupted his account of the relations of the European yahoos with their horses, to point out the inferiority of all practical purposes of the yahoo shape the Flatness of my face. The prominence of my nose, mine Eyes placed directly in Front, so that I could not loon on either side without turning my head that I was not able to feed myself without lifting one of my four feet to my mouth; and therefore Nature had placed those faints to answer that Necessity.
One of the frats moot attractive characters Don Pedro de Monday, is placed in a position at the end of the book where the comparison with the Houyhnhnms is inevitable, and our sympathies are alienated by the humorless arrogance both of the Houyhnhnms themselves, and of Gulliver when absorbed in admiration of his former master, he avoids his own family to concentrate on the neighing of those two degenerate Houyhnhnms beep in my stable’ Clumsiness of this bind is not usual with swift, who is well average as a rule, of the way to enlist our sympathy for a character, and shows his awareness in the darning of Gulliver in the voyage to Lilliputian, The whole cower of his work makes it unlikely that he could be unaware of the unpleasantness of such passages as this possible, then, the acid is a deliberate one and the Houyhnhnms, far from being a model of perfection, is intended to slow the inadequacy of the life of reason.
The characteristic of Swift's satire is precisely his inability, or his refusal, to present as straightforwardly with a positive to aim at. There is not usually a 'norm' in swift's satire, positively and unequivocally stated. As in the first two boobs in Gulliver's Travels no one person or group of people is put forward for our approval, and neither the Lilliputian, the Brobdingnagians, nor Gulliver Himself, can be regarded as a consistent satirizing norm against which the moral and political vagaries of eighteenth-century England are to be precisely misacted soft slips from one side to another according as his as isolates satiric point require it, and we are at one moment to admire, at another to dislike, the creatures of his imagination. In none of the first, their boobs are we left with a consistent standard embodied in any creature, and if would seem that if the Houyhnhnms are presented fairly and squarely for our appraisal change is involved not only in swift's normal method but in his whole attitude of mind. He would hardly present the radical primitivism and rationalism of Houyhnhnms land as desirable, at least without the ironic and skeptical withdrawal that his uncertain temperament demanded.
The word Houyhahnms we are told means 'Perfection of Nature. These are not human beings, but virtuous animals, perfect but limited natural creatures, of a 'nature not simply unattainable by man but irrelevant to him and incapable not only of the depth, but also of the heights, to which humanity can reach. The Houyhnhnms have no shame, no temptations, no conception of sin they are fatally unable to comprehend the purpose of lying or other common temptations of man. They cm live by real on because they have been created passionless in man. We show, that the passions are apt to get astride of the reason, which is not strong enough to restrain them, and the result in its extremist form is seen in the yahoos but the Houyhnhnms have no passion to control. They can live harmlessly by reason because their nature is different from ours. They have only the negative virtue of blame lessees.
Gulliver and the other humans of Book IV are alertly distinguished from the yahoos as well as from the Houyhnhnms, and the difference in their mental and physical habits is strongly insisted upon. They study apart from the two races of this animal world, separated from both by characteristics of which neither the naturally virtuous and rational animals nor the vicious and irrational ones, have my knowledge in fact by the characteristics proper to humanity. Man does indeed share the yahoos' propensity to evil, but he has compensating qualities which the bestial yahoos have not possessed since their first degeneration, and with these qualities he may surpass the cold rational virtue of the Houyhnhnms.
Like all people of the Gulliver's Travels the Gouyhnhnms have some characteristics suck as honesty and truthfulness which we might well try to follow, and they are used for particular satiric points, but as a whole, they represent inadequate and inhuman rationalism, and the negative of their blameless life is part of Swift's deliberate intonation. For us with our less perfect but also less limited mature, to try to live like them would men's abandoning the purely human passion belittles as well as the disadvantages of our own nature.
0 মন্তব্যসমূহ