The Queen of Brobdingnag:The Brobdingnagian queen is hardly a

well-developed character in this novel, but she is important in one sense:

she is one of the very few females in Gullivers Travels who is given much
notice. Gullivers own wife is scarcely even mentioned, even at what one
would expect to be the touching moment of homecoming at the end of
the fourth voyage. Gulliver seems little more than indifferent to his wife.
The farmers daughter in Brobdingnag wins some of Gullivers attention
but chiefly because she cares for him so tenderly. Gulliver is courteous
to the empress of Lilliput but presumably mainly because she is royalty.
The queen of Brobdingnag, however, arouses some deeper feelings in
Gulliver that go beyond her royal status. He compliments her effusively,
as he does no other female personage in the work, calling her infinitely
witty and humorous. He describes in proud detail the manner in which
he is permitted to kiss the tip of her little finger. For her part, the queen
seems earnest in her concern about Gullivers welfare. When her court
dwarf insults him, she gives the dwarf away to another household as
punishment. The interaction between Gulliver and the queen hints that
Gulliver is indeed capable of emotional connections.

Lord Munodi:Lord Munodi is a minor character, but he plays the

important role of showing the possibility of individual dissent within a
brainwashed community. While the inhabitants of Lagado pursue their
attempts to extract sunbeams from cucumbers and to eliminate all verbs
and adjectives from their language, Munodi is a rare example of practical
intelligence. Having tried unsuccessfully to convince his fellows of their
misguided public policies, he has given up and is content to practice
what he preaches on his own estates. In his kindness to strangers,
Munodi is also a counterexample to the contemptuous treatment that the
other Laputians and Lagadans show Gulliver. He takes his guest on a
tour of the kingdom, explains the advantages of his own estates without
boasting, and is, in general, a figure of great common sense and
humanity amid theoretical delusions and impractical fantasizing. As a
figure isolated from his community, Munodi is similar to Gulliver, though
Gulliver is unaware of his alienation while Munodi suffers acutely from
his. Indeed, in Munodi we glimpse what Gulliver could be if he were
wiser: a figure able to think critically about life and society.
Don Pedro de Mendez:Don Pedro is a minor character in terms of
plot, but he plays an important symbolic role at the end of the novel. He
treats the half-deranged Gulliver with great patience, even tenderness,
when he allows him to travel on his ship as far as Lisbon, offering to give
him his own finest suit of clothes to replace the seamans tatters, and
giving him twenty pounds for his journey home to England. Don Pedro
never judges Gulliver, despite Gullivers abominably antisocial behavior
on the trip back. Ironically, though Don Pedro shows the same kind of
generosity and understanding that Gullivers Houyhnhnm master earlier
shows him, Gulliver still considers Don Pedro a repulsive Yahoo. Were
Gulliver able to escape his own delusions, he might be able to see the
Houyhnhnm-like reasonableness and kindness in Don Pedros behavior.
Don Pedro is thus the touchstone through which we see that Gulliver is
no longer a reliable and objective commentator on the reality he sees but,
rather, a skewed observer of a reality colored by private delusions.

Mary Burton Gulliver: Gullivers wife is mentioned only briefly

at the beginning of the novel and appears only for an instant at the
conclusion. Gulliver never thinks about Mary on his travels and never
feels guilty about his lack of attention to her. A dozen far more trivial
characters get much greater attention than she receives. She is, in this
respect, the opposite of Odysseuss wife Penelope in the Odyssey, who is
never far from her husbands thoughts and is the final destination of his
journey. Marys neglected presence in Gullivers narrative gives her a
certain claim to importance. It suggests that despite Gullivers curiosity
about new lands and exotic races, he is virtually indifferent to those
people closest to him. His lack of interest in his wife bespeaks his
underdeveloped inner life. Gulliver is a man of skill and knowledge in
certain practical matters, but he is disadvantaged in self-reflection,
personal interactions, and perhaps overall wisdom.