English Literature books summary

They arrive in the largest city, Lorbrulgrud, and the farmer rents a

room with a table for displaying Gulliver. By now he can understand their

language and speak it fairly well. He is shown ten times a day and pleases

the visitors greatly.

Part II, Chapters 3-5

Summary

The strain of travelling and performing "tricks" takes its toll on

Gulliver, and he begins to grow very thin. The farmer notices this and

resolves to make as much money as possible before Gulliver dies. Meanwhile,

an order comes from the court, commanding the farmer to bring Gulliver to

the Queen for her entertainment.

The Queen is delighted with Gulliver's behavior and buys him from the

farmer for a thousand gold pieces. Gulliver requests that Glumdalclitch be

allowed to live in the palace as well. Gulliver explains his suffering to

the Queen, and she is impressed by his intelligence. She takes him to the

King, who at first thinks he is a mechanical creation. He sends for great

scholars to observe Gulliver, and they decide that he is unfit for

survival, since there is no way he could feed himself. Gulliver tries to

explain that he comes from a country in which everything is in proportion

to himself, but they do not seem to believe him.

Glumdalclitch is given an apartment in the palace and a governess to teach

her, and special quarters are built for Gulliver out of a box. They also

have clothes made for him from fine silk, but Gulliver finds them very

cumbersome. The Queen grows very used to his company, finding him very

entertaining at dinner, especially when he cuts and eats his meat. He finds

her way of eating repulsive, since her size allows her to swallow huge

amounts of food in a single gulp.

The King converses with Gulliver on issues of politics, and laughs at

his descriptions of the goings-on in Europe. He finds it amusing that

people of such small stature should think themselves so important, and

Gulliver is at first offended. He then comes to realize that he too has

begun to think of his world as ridiculous, since it is so small and yet

sees itself as so important.

The Queen's dwarf is not happy with Gulliver, since he is used to

being the smallest person in the palace and a source of diversion for the

royal court. He drops Gulliver into a bowl of cream, but Gulliver is able

to swim to safety and the dwarf is punished. At another point the dwarf

sticks Gulliver into a marrowbone, where he is forced to remain until

someone pulls him out.

Gulliver then describes the country for the reader, noting first that

since the land stretches out about six thousand miles there must be a

severe error in European maps. The kingdom is bound on one side by

mountains and on the other three sides by the sea. The water is very rough,

so there is no trade with other nations. The rivers are well stocked with

giant-sized fish, but the fish in the sea are of the same size as those in

the rest of the world and therefore not worth catching.

Gulliver is carried around the city in a special travelling-box, and

people always crowd around to see him. He asks to see the largest temple in

the country and is not overwhelmed by its size, since at a height of three

thousand feet it is proportionally smaller than the largest steeple in

England.

Gulliver is happy in Brobdingnag except for the many mishaps that

befall him because of his diminutive size. In one unpleasant incident, the

dwarf, unhappy at Gulliver for teasing him, shakes an apple tree over his

head and one of the apples strikes Gulliver in the back and knocks him

over. Another time, he is left outside during a hailstorm and is so bruised

and battered that he cannot leave the house for ten days.

Gulliver and his nursemaid are often invited to the apartments of the

ladies of the court, and there he is treated as a plaything of little

significance. They enjoy stripping his clothes and placing him in their

bosoms, and he is appalled by their strong smell, noting that he was told

by a Lilliputian that he smelled quite repulsive to them. The women also

strip their own clothes in front of him, and he finds their skin very ugly

and uneven.

The Queen constructs a way for Gulliver to sail, ordering a special boat to

be built for him. This is placed in a cistern, and Gulliver rows in it for

his own enjoyment and for the amusement of the Queen and her court. Yet

another danger arises in the form of a monkey, which takes Gulliver up a

ladder, holding him like a baby and force-feeding him. He is rescued from

the monkey, and Glumdalclitch pries the food from his mouth with a needle,

after which he vomits. He is so weak and bruised that he stays in bed for

two weeks. The monkey is killed and orders are sent out that no other

monkeys be kept in the palace.

Part II, Chapters 6-8

Summary

Gulliver makes himself a comb from the stumps of hair left after the

King has been shaved. He also collects hairs from the King and uses them to

weave the backs of two small chairs, which he gives to the Queen as

curiosities.

Gulliver is brought to a musical performance, but it is so loud that

he can hardly make it out. Gulliver decides to play the spinet for the

royal family, but must contrive a novel way to do it, since the instrument

is so big. He uses large sticks and must run over the keyboard with them,

but he can still strike only sixteen keys.

Thinking that the King has unjustly come to regard his home country as

insignificant and laughable, Gulliver tries to tell him more about Britain,

describing the government and culture there. The King asks many questions,

and is particularly struck by the violence of the history Gulliver

describes.

He then takes Gulliver into his hand and, explaining that he finds the

world that Gulliver describes to be ridiculous, contemptuous and strange,

tells him that he concludes that "the bulk of your natives [are] the most

pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl

upon the surface of the earth."

Gulliver is disturbed by the King's proclamation. He tries to tell him

about gunpowder, describing it as a great invention, and offering it to the

King as a gesture of friendship. The King is appalled by the proposal, and

Gulliver is taken aback, thinking that the King has refused a great

opportunity. He says that the King is unnecessarily scrupulous and narrow-

minded for not being more open to the inventions of Gulliver's world.

Gulliver finds the people of Brobdingnag in general to be ignorant and

poorly educated. Their laws are not allowed to exceed in words the number

of letters in their alphabet, and no arguments may be written about them.

They know the art of printing but do not have many books, and their

writing is simple and straightforward. One text describes the

insignificance and weakness of humans, and argues that at one point they

must have been much larger.

Gulliver wants to recover his freedom. The King orders any small ship

to be brought to the city, hoping that they might find a woman with which

Gulliver can propagate. Gulliver fears that any offspring thus produced

would be kept in cages or given to the nobility as pets. He has been in the

country for two years and wants to be among his owned kind again.

Gulliver is taken to the south coast, and both Glumdalclitch and

Gulliver fall ill. Gulliver says that he wants fresh air, and a page

carries him out to the shore in his travelling-box. He asks to be left to

sleep in his hammock, and the boy wanders o_. An eagle grabs hold of his

box and flies off with him, and then suddenly Gulliver feels himself

falling and lands in the water.

He worries that he will drown or starve to death, but then feels the

box being pulled. He hears a voice telling him that his box is tied to a

ship, and that a carpenter will come to drill a hole in the top. Gulliver

says that they can simply use a finger to pry it open, and hears laughter.

He realizes that he is speaking to people of his own height and climbs a

ladder out of his box and onto their ship.

Gulliver begins to recover on the ship, and he tries to tell the

sailors the story of his recent journey. He shows them things he saved from

Brobdingnag, like his comb and a tooth pulled from a footman. He has

trouble adjusting to their small size, and finds himself shouting all the

time. When he reaches home it takes him some time to grow accustomed to his

old life, and his wife asks him never to go to sea again.

Part III, Chapters 1-3

Summary

Gulliver has only been home in England ten days when a visitor comes

to his house, asking him to sail aboard his ship in two months' time.

Gulliver agrees and prepares to set out for the East Indies. On the voyage,

the ship is attacked by pirates. Gulliver hears a Dutch voice among them

and speaks to the pirate in Dutch, begging to be set free since he and the

pirate are both Christians. A Japanese pirate tells them they will not die,

and Gulliver tells the Dutchman that he is surprised to find more mercy in

a heathen than in a Christian. The pirate grows angry and punishes him by

sending him out to sea in a small boat with only four days' worth of food.

Gulliver finds some islands and goes ashore on one of them. He sets up

camp but then notices something strange: the sun is mysteriously obscured

for some time. He then sees a land mass dropping down and notices that it

is crawling with people. He is baffed by this oating island, and he shouts

up to its inhabitants. They lower the island and send down a chain, by

which he is able to crawl up.

He is immediately surrounded by people and notices their oddities.

Their heads are all tilted to one side or the other, with one eye turned

inward and the other looking up. Their clothes are adorned with images of

celestial bodies and musical instruments. Some of the people are servants,

and they carry a Goddamn knows what made of a stick with a pouch tied to

the end. Their job is to aid conversation by striking the ear of the

listener and the mouth of the speaker at the appropriate times; otherwise,

the minds of their masters would wander o_.

Gulliver is conveyed to the King, who sits behind a table loaded with

mathematical instruments. They wait an hour before there is some

opportunity to arouse him from his thoughts, at which point he is struck

with the apper. The King says something, and Gulliver's ear is struck with

the apper as well, even though he tries to explain that he doesn't require

it. It becomes clear that he and the King cannot speak any of the same

languages, so Gulliver is taken to an apartment and served dinner.

A teacher is sent to instruct Gulliver in the language of the island,

and he is able to learn several sentences. He discovers that the name of

the island is Laputa, which in their language means " oating island." A

tailor is also sent to improve his clothes, and while he is waiting for

these the King orders the island to be moved. It is taken to a point above

the capital city of the kingdom, Lagado, passing villages along the way and

collecting petitions from the King's subjects by means of ropes sent down

to the lands below.

The language of the Laputans depends greatly on mathematics and music,

and they despise practical geometry, thinking it vulgarso much so that they

make sure that there are no right angles in their buildings. They are very

good with charts and figures but very clumsy in practical matters. They

dread changes in the celestial bodies.

The island is exactly circular and consists of ten thousand acres of

land. At the center there is a cave for astronomers, containing all their

instruments and a loadstone six yards long. It moves the island with its

magnetic force, since it has two charges that can be reversed by means of

an attached control.

The mineral that acts upon the magnet is only large enough to allow it

to move over the country directly beneath it. When the King wants to punish

a particular region of the country, he can keep the island above it,

depriving the lands below of sun and rain. This failed to work in one town,

where the rebellious inhabitants had stored provisions of food in advance.

They planned to force the island to come so low that it would be trapped

forever and to kill the King and his officials in order to take over the

government.

Instead, the King ordered the island to stop descending and gave in to

the town's demands. The King is not allowed to leave the oating island, nor

is his family.

Part III, Chapters 4-10

Summary

Gulliver feels neglected on Laputa, since the inhabitants seem

interested in only mathematics and music and are far superior to him in

their knowledge.

He is bored by their conversation and wants to leave. There is one

lord of the court whom Gulliver finds to be intelligent and curious, but

who is known to the other inhabitants of Laputa as the stupidest of all

because he has no ear for music. Gulliver asks this lord to petition the

King to let him leave the island. The petition succeeds, and he is let down

on the mountains above Lagado. He visits another lord there and is invited

to stay at his home.

Gulliver and his host visit a nearby town, which Gulliver finds to be

populated by poorly dressed inhabitants living in shabby houses. The soil

is badly cultivated and the people appear miserable. They then travel to

the lord's country house, first passing many barren fields but then

arriving in a lush green area that the lord says belongs to his estate. He

says that he is criticized heavily by the other lords for the

"mismanagement" of his land.

The lord explains that forty years ago some people went to Laputa and

returned with new ideas about mathematics and art. They decided to

establish an academy in Lagado to develop new theories on agriculture and

construction and to initiate projects to improve the lives of the city's

inhabitants. However, the theories have never produced any results and the

new techniques have left the country in ruin. He encourages Gulliver to

visit the academy, which Gulliver is glad to do since he had once been

intrigued by projects of this sort himself.

Gulliver visits the academy, where he meets a man engaged in a project

to extract the sunbeams from cucumbers. He also meets a scientist trying to

separate out the different parts of excrement, hoping to produce food from

it. Another is attempting to turn ice into gunpowder and is writing a

treatise about the malleability of _re, hoping to have it published. An

architect is designing a way to build houses starting from the roof, and a

blind master is teaching his blind apprentices to mix colors for painters

according to smell and touch. An agronomist is designing a method of

plowing fields with hogs by first burying food in the ground and then

letting the hogs loose to dig them out. A doctor in another room tries to

cure patients by blowing air through them; Gulliver leaves him trying to

revive a dog that he has killed by "curing" him in this way.

On the other side of the academy there are people engaged in

speculative learning. One professor has a class full of boys working from a

machine that produces random sets of words; using this, the teacher claims,

anyone can write a book on philosophy or politics. A linguist in another

room is attempting to remove all the elements of language except nouns;

this would make language more concise and prolong lives, since every word

spoken is detrimental to the human body. Since nouns are only things,

furthermore, it would be even easier to carry things and never speak at

all.

Gulliver then visits professors who are studying issues of government.

One claims that women should be taxed according to their beauty and skill

at dressing, another that conspiracies against the government could be

discovered by studying the excrement of subjects. Gulliver grows tired of

the academy and begins to yearn for a return to England. He tries to travel

to Luggnagg, but finds no ship available. Since he has to wait a month, he

is advised to take a trip to the island of GLUBBDUBDRIB the island of

magicians.

Gulliver visits the governor of GLUBBDUBDRIB, and finds that he is

attended by servants who appear and disappear like spirits. The governor

tells Gulliver that he has the power to call up whomever he would like to

speak to; Gulliver chooses Alexander the Great, who assures him that he

died not from poison but from excessive drinking. He then sees Hannibal,

Caesar, Pompey and Brutus. Gulliver sets apart one day to speak with the

most venerated people in history, starting with Homer and Aristotle. He

asks Descartes and Gassendi to describe their systems to Aristotle, who

freely acknowledges his own mistakes.

Gulliver returns to Luggnagg, where he is confined despite his desire

to return to England. He is ordered to appear at the King's court and is

given lodging and an allowance. The Luggnuggians tell him about certain

immortal people, children born with a red spot on their foreheads and

called Struldbruggs. Gulliver devises a whole system of what he would do if

he were immortal, starting with the acquisition of riches and knowledge. He

is told that after the age of thirty, most Struldbruggs grew sad and

dejected; by eighty, they were incapable of affection and envious of those

who could die. If two of the Struldbruggs married, the marriage was

dissolved when one reached eighty, because "those who are condemned without

any fault of their own to a perpetual continuance in the world should not

have their misery doubled by the load of a wife." He meets some of these

people and finds them to be unhappy and unpleasant, and he regrets ever

wishing for their state.

Gulliver is then finally able to depart from Luggnagg, refusing

employment there, and he arrives safely in Japan. From there he gains

passage on a Dutch ship by pretending to be from Holland and sets sail from

Amsterdam to England, where he finds his family in good health.

Summary

Gulliver stays home for five months, but then leaves his pregnant wife

to set sail again, this time as the captain of a ship called the Adventure.

Many of his sailors die of illness, so he recruits more along the way. His

crew mutinies under the influence of these new sailors, and they become

pirates. Gulliver is left on an unknown shore, after being confined to his

cabin for several days.

He sees animals in the distance, and describes them as long-haired,

with beards like goats and sharp claws which they use to climb trees.

Gulliver decides that they are very ugly and sets forth to find settlers,

but encounters one of the animals on his way.

He takes out his sword and hits the animal with the side of it. The

animal roars loudly, and a herd of others like it attack Gulliver by

attempting to defecate on him. He hides, but then sees them hurrying away.

He emerges from his hiding place to see that the beasts have been scared

away by a horse.

The horse observes him carefully, and then neighs in a complicated

cadence. Another horse joins the first and the two seem to be involved in a

discussion. Gulliver tries to leave but one of the horses calls him back.

The horses appear to be so intelligent that Gulliver concludes that

they are magicians who have transformed themselves into horses. He

addresses them directly, and asks to be taken to a house or village. The

horses use the words Yahoo and Houyhnhnm, which Gulliver tries to

pronounce.

Gulliver is led to a house, and he takes out gifts, expecting to meet

people. He finds instead that there are more horses in the house, sitting

down and engaged in various activities. He thinks that the house belongs to

a person of great importance, and wonders why they should have horses for

servants. A horse looks Gulliver over and says the word "Yahoo." Gulliver

is led out to the courtyard, where a few of the ugly creatures are tied up.

One creature and Gulliver are lined up and compared, and he finds that the

creature does look quite human. The horses test him by offering him various

foods: hay, which he refuses, and flesh, which he finds repulsive but which

the Yahoo devours. The horses determine that he likes milk and give him

large amounts of it to drink.

Another horse comes to dine, and they all take great pleasure in teaching

Gulliver to pronounce words in their language. They cannot determine what

he might like to eat, until Gulliver suggests that he could make bread from

their oats. He is given a place to sleep with straw for the time being.

Gulliver endeavours to learn the horses' language, and they are

impressed by his intellect and curiosity. After three months he can answer

most of their questions and tries to explain that he comes from across the

sea, but the horses, or "Houyhnhnms," do not believe it to be possible.

They think he is some kind of a Yahoo, though superior to the rest of his

species. He asks them to stop using that word to refer to him, and they

consent.

Gulliver tries to explain that the Yahoos are the governing creatures

where he comes from, and the Houyhnhnms ask how their horses are employed.

Gulliver explains that they are used for travelling, racing, and drawing

chariots, and the Houyhnhnms express disbelief that anything as weak as a

Yahoo would dare to mount a horse that was so much stronger than it does.

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