Los viajes de Gulliver

Gulliver's Travels is a masterful piece of satire and one of the masterful works of Western literature. Despite this, it seems that it is being lost to tides of ennui and a culture determined to undermine and belittle this masterpiece.

Going into reading this book, one would expect something of a children's story. That is how it has been presented for at least a century now, with the focus on Gulliver's adventure in Lilliput where he encounters a civilization in miniature. Aside from committing the absurd mistake of treating the Gulliver's Travels as if it were called Gulliver's Travel, this view ignores any sort of social commentary on human society, both in general and in Swift's time. It is also incomplete without his other travels where he visits the gargantuan Brobdignagians, the scientific minded Laputans, the necromatic Glubbdubdrib magician, the unfortunate immortals of Luggnagg, and the horse beings known as Houyhnhnms. To focus only on the Lilliputans is a disservice to the novel and to whomever you are introducing Gulliver's Travels to. Each journey is a new perspective on humanity, form being insignificant, to being grand, to being scientific, to being dumb savages. All these viewpoints with their advantages and disadvantages make an excellent whole that is lost if only a part is viewed, and that part is considered childish literature.

Ultimately, one needs to be ready to read Gulliver's Travels. If one is not in the right mindset, the purpose would be lost, the humour ignored, and it would become a chore to read. Which would be a tragedy, since it is definitively deserving of the term Classic.