Dès le début, le lecteur est pris à contrepied par l’intimité étonnamment querelleuse que manifeste le récit, et une instabilité dans le registre de l’ironie qui évolue en permanence. Dans les trois premiers livres, elle attaque de manière conventionnelle les humains pour ce qu’ils font, mais à la fin du livre III et tout au long du livre IV, les humains sont attaqués pour ce qu’ils sont. This is part of what Swift meant when he told Pope that the story was designed to vex the world rather than divert it.ĭans cette anatomie de l’animal humain que constituent les Voyages de Gulliver, la satire est particulièrement radicale, générale et violente. The reader is thus left without the comfort and foothold of an extreme denunciation which could be dismissed as self-disarming precisely because the implied satirist’s voice is disengaged from the character. While knowing that the details of Gulliver’s enraged diatribes are substantiated by the facts of the narrative, the unhinged nature of the speaker’s voice must be discounted as being in Timon’s manner which Swift explicitly disavowed in a famous letter to his friend Pope.

But the reader is left uncertain as to the exact degree and tone of this separation. The naïve Gulliver’s praise of humanity, as well as his deranged condemnation of it in the final book, are both separate from the implied voice of the satirist, which always makes itself felt. From the beginning, the reader is wrongfooted by an unusually quarrelsome intimacy on the part of the narrative, and a constantly shifting instability in the register of the irony. In the first three books it conventionally attacks humans for what they do, but at the end of book III and throughout book IV humans are attacked for what they are. The satire in Swift’s anatomy of the human animal in Gulliver’s Travels is unusually radical, comprehensive and aggressive.

Gentle reader definition