Knowledge Theme Analysis

Gulliver’s Travels also considers the value of knowledge and its best applications in life. The novel surveys many different kinds of knowledge and examines the effect they have on the people possessing them. Gulliver’s worldly knowledge about other societies and lifestyles makes him tolerant and open-minded person, able to see both sides of most stories while many of the minds around him are more rigid. Still, it’s unclear if this knowledge actually serves Gulliver well—it ends up, after all, leaving him dissatisfied and lonely, estranged from his family and his society and wishing futilely that he was one of the Houyhnhmms. In Brobdingnag and the land of the Houyhnhnms, the novel considers the kind of political knowledge that both the Brobdingnagian king and the Houyhnhnms lack. Yet, while both are ignorant of gunpowder, Machiavellian strategies, and the use of fear and violence to keep people in line, both organize successful, happy societies that seem much more functional than those governed by the more “sophisticated” political knowledge of Europe. The novel also compares practical scientific knowledge, as practiced to valuable effect by the Lilliputians and the Houyhnhnms, to abstract scientific knowledge, as practiced to useless effect by the the Laputians. The Laputians’ knowledge, Swift shows, may as well be ignorance, for they don’t put their theories to any useful purpose and only waste their lives on fruitless experimentation. Finally, the novel considers self-knowledge as it is gradually acquired by Gulliver over the course of the novel, most so in Book 4. One could see Gulliver’s end as an awakening to his true self (and the true self of all human beings), which leaves him disgusted with human nature. However, one could also see Gulliver’s end as a tragic exaggeration of self knowledge such that he amplifies human evil beyond its actual proportions and thereby bars himself from integrating productively into the human society he should be a part of.

In most of these instances, knowledge becomes harmful when it approaches an extreme: problems arise if one only understands scientific and mathematic abstraction, as the Laputians do, or if one only pursues knowledge of foreign lands without spending time at home among one’s own people, as in the case of Gulliver himself. Thus, the novel seems implicitly to advocate a moderate balance between practical and abstract knowledge, between knowledge of the outside world and knowledge of one’s own position in it.