Gulliver's Travels Part 2, Chapters 5-8
Part 2, Chapters 5-8
Gulliver has to contend with several challenges owing to his size, and claims that he would have been happy in that country were it not for the frequent and ridiculous encounters that he was forced to bear owing to his diminutive size. Once he had been set into the garden by his little nurse and had nearly been pummelled to death by hail that suddenly began to fall. The maids of honor at court enjoyed having Gulliver around but tended to treat him quite roughly and rudely. They would undress Gulliver and place him between their breasts. Gulliver hated their treatment for they tended to smell most offensively. He recalled that a friend had said the same thing about him when he had been residing in Lilliput.
The queen hearing Gulliver talk of his voyages at sea asked him whether he was capable of sailing, and he gladly told her that although he was not a master, he could hold his own. The queen had her joiner make him a small boat that according to Gulliver could seat six people of his size. She also had a trough made in which the ladies of the court would stir up gales with their fans, or the pages would blow into it so that Gulliver could sail around the trough as he pleased. The page responsible for filing the trough with water accidentally fished out a frog, which hid in the water until Gulliver began his sailing. The frog jumped aboard the ship when Gulliver passed him, and nearly caused his boat to overturn, but he chose to fight the thing on his own without the aid of his little nurse. All of these small yet nearly fatal incidents caused Gulliver to worry that his nurse would curtail his liberty and so sometimes chose to hide such accidents.
The most fatal and comical incident occurred when Gulliver was carried away by a monkey who supposed that the Gulliver was its child. It cradled him, tried to feed him, and patted him gently. Gulliver chose not to protest as the animal nearly squeezed him to death at a small sign of resistance. The monkey ran away with him to the roof when Gulliver's nurse entered the chamber he was placed in. The monkey continued to evade those that sought to recover Gulliver. It finally dropped him when several of the attendants used ladders to climb on the roof. It took Gulliver several days to recover from the ordeal, and after he had gained his health he was summoned to meet with the king. At dinner, the king questions him about the incident, and Gulliver attempts to make a brave showing of himself but this only arouses laughter in his audience.
Gulliver attends the morning rituals of the king and observes him being shaved. He asks for some of the lather from which he extracts some hairs, and fashions from them a comb. He then asks for the queen's hair that fall off at the time of combing, and uses them to weave a chair upon a wooden frame and presents it as a gift to that fair lady, and makes for his nurse a decorative purse from that same material. Gulliver spends a lot of time with the King, and endeavors to change his opinion about his nature which he perceived to be rather insignificant. The king and Gulliver spend many sessions in conversation, as Gulliver recounts the customs and polity of his country. He speaks highly of the process of election of representatives, the nature of their parliament, the practices of their nobility, and the several wars that the country has undertaken in the recent past. The king takes meticulous notes about all the things that Gulliver tells him, and attempts to dissect the concepts he hears. At their sixth session, the King takes Gulliver gently into his hand and informs him that his people seem to be the most pernicious creatures that God had sought to put on the earth. He concludes that Gulliver, having spent most of his life in travel had been shielded from the negative values that seemed to run throughout the culture and polity of his country.
Gulliver defends himself against the conclusion of the king, he claims that he did all he could to ensure that the king only ever heard of the positive aspects of their laws and culture. However, given the King's lack of exposure to the modern world, being stuck on an island, unable to experience the way of life in other parts of the world, his narrow-mindedness can be expected. He then attempts to repay the kindness of the king in dealing with him, by telling him that he is capable of compounding gun powder. He then describes the applications of gunpowder in modern warfare and the level of destruction that it can unleash in a short time. The king is horrified at the casual manner in which Gulliver speaks of bloodshed and ruin, he expresses his contempt for such an invention and forbids him from ever speaking on the matter.
Gulliver is also surprised at the King's reaction when he tells the king of the several thousand books that have been written on the management of the state, morality, and other subjects. The King feels that governance ought to be carried out using simple principles that even the commonest folk can easily understand. Indeed, when Gulliver reads some of the books from the king's library, which is the largest in the kingdom but has only a few thousand volumes, he learns that their laws are written with such clarity that their interpretation is simple and easy. Gulliver is also impressed with the sight of the militias that the city keeps, however, in number the whole country's army is rather diminutive. He learns from the histories that the army was founded in reaction to civil wars, that were inspired by similar reasons in this land as they were in Europe. The nobles sometimes sought ascendance, the people sought liberation, and the King sought absolute rule.
After spending two years in the land of giants, Gulliver finally manages to escape most unusually. The king had given his soldiers notice that any ship coming close to their land must immediately be seized ad brought to him, for he was interested in securing a female mate for Gulliver through which he hoped to propagate that race of little men. Gulliver is rightly horrified at such a fate but finds himself unable to muster any resistance, although he always thinks of escape to his own country.
The king and Queen decide to spend a few days in one of their coastal cities, and they take Gulliver along in his traveling box as well as his little nurse. She falls sick due to the journey, and Gulliver feigns illness as well, wishing to see the ocean which to him was certainly the only means of returning home. One of the pages takes Gulliver's traveling box and deposits it on the beach while he grows distracted and goes out in search of birds' eggs. Gulliver retires to his hammock but is rudely awakened by a monstrous jolt. He realizes that his box has been lifted by a bird and that it perhaps seeks to break it open like a tortoiseshell. His box falls from a great height and directly into the water, it manages to remain intact and afloat. Gulliver is certain that he will perish very soon, but begins to feel a tugging on his box. He unfurls a handkerchief and waves it through a hole in the ceiling and yells for help. His box hits against the side of a ship, and an Englishman replies to his cries of help. Gulliver is rescued from his box by a carpenter but is extremely disconcerted due to the trauma of his rescue and being around people his own size.
The captain believes that Gulliver had lost his mind due to being in the box, and allows him to recover, meanwhile the crew strip Gulliver's traveling box of all valuable things and cast the tower back into the ocean. Gulliver manages to convince the crew about the veracity of his account through the use of the items he had collected and secured in his cabinet which the crew had seen fit to recover. Gulliver returns to England after 9 months of the voyage and makes his way home, all the while being amazed at the littleness of the things he had around. His behavior with his wife and children is also affected by his habit of being around giants, and they too are for a little time convinced that his travels had unhinged him. His wife entreats him that he should never again return to the sea.
Analysis
Gulliver's interaction with the noblewomen at court can be thought to impart another valuable lesson. Gulliver is certain that the women are perfectly beautiful and smell fair to people of their own size, however, to him they are repulsive and offensive. The moral lesson being that those things that appear attractive and good may generally only do so at a great distance and that their true or rather sinister nature can only be gleaned from close observation. The use of microscopes was a burgeoning technology when the book was written, and Gulliver lives these microscopic views as he describes the disturbing physiology of flies and wasps.
Gulliver attempts to change the king's opinion about his culture and nature, as he tries to expound on the various institutions of power and the supposed sophisticated means of governance among his people. The king's reaction is quite the opposite of what Gulliver had expected, for he had thought the king would be impresses by their industrious culture and the significant technological advancement that the tiny Europeans have made. However, the king very gently explains to Gulliver that his people are not only insignificant because of their size, but rather possess a mean intellect and he describes all of humanity as being odious. This conclusion is driven all the better due to Gulliver's nature, and his seemingly futile attempts to defend the honor of his people and culture. In this way, a parallel can be drawn between Gulliver and the Lilliputians, who like Gulliver continue to expound on their significance in the presence of a creature that could kill them and all their people with relative ease.
