[Gutenberg 829] • Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World

Gulliver's Travels has been called many things: Menippean satire, children's story, proto-Science Fiction and even the forerunner of the modern novel. Published seven years after Daniel Defoe's wildly successful Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels may be read as a rebuttal of Defoes optimistic account of human capability. In The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man Warren Montag argues that Swift was concerned to refute the notion that the individual precedes society, as Defoe's novel seems to suggest. Swift regarded such thought as a dangerous endorsement of Thomas Hobbes' radical political philosophy and for this reason Gulliver repeatedly encounters established societies rather than desolate islands. The captain who invites Gulliver to serve as a surgeon aboard his ship on the disastrous third voyage is named Robinson. Possibly one of the reasons for the book's classic status is that it can be seen as many things to many different people.