Critical Summary

In reading 10 critical summaries of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, several trends and repeating topics arise. Most of them focus on one of two topics, the first being how Gulliver’s Travels is similar to Thomas More’s Utopia. This topic came up twice, and in both of the criticisms the author made the point that Utopia had an influence on Swift or that the irony of the two was similar. The main point of this argument is that Gulliver’s Travels vision of a perfect society and Utopia’s vision are both flawed and go against the grain of how the author truly felt. The second recurring theme was the “entrapment” of the reader by Swift, who forced the reader to abandon his pride and used ambiguity to let the reader fill in the story. Both of these were common topics, but by far the most interesting criticism was Swift And Psychoanalysis, Language And Woman by Ruth Salvaggio which goes on to accuse Swift of being afraid of the feminine and even of being obsessed with anal eroticism. The wide array of criticisms makes it difficult to isolate a single theme, but this sheds light on the property of Gulliver’s Travels to be an unpredictable and open to interpretation sort of a book, where every person that reads it can take a different interpretation and message away from it.
Frederik N. Smith in The Danger Of Reading Swift: The Double Binds Of Gulliver's Travels explains out how he perceives Swift’s writing style. He argues that the ambiguity and holes in the book that have angered and annoyed many other critics are necessary to the book. Saying that “a reader can be trapped because he desires coherence and will create it where he finds little or none.” (Smith 46), Smith argues that the Swift’s ambiguity was purposeful and that it actually adds to the reader’s understanding of the book. The same idea is described in Samuel Kliger’s The Unity of Gulliver's Travels. Kliger basically says that the way that Swift organizes his ideas makes it impossible to get a good...