Assignments for Session 3.

The Enlightenment in Europe

Name: Phạm Thùy Trang
Stiudent’s ID: 1622205
Class: K20C

I. Jonathan Swift
“Introduction”
1. What does Swift allegorically imply in the narrative of Lilliput and of Brobdingnag?
The preocupations and and produres of a race of people six inches high in Lilliput mockes the
pettiness of English, and the encounter the giants of Brobdingnag and the conservation between
Gulliver and the king implies the patrotism.

2. What is the main content and tone/voice of part IV of the novel?

Main content: the author want to discuss about the bad tendency of humans, when left with no
ability to reason, people, like the Yahoos, will behave out of pure-and repulsive-passion: lust,
envy, avarice, greed, and rage. The author highlights the significance of rational ability by
outlining Houyhnhnms' repetitive, ordered, and conflict-free lives in society.
The tones: sarcastic, critical, ironic.

Quotations of Gulliver’s Travels

3. In chapter 1 of part IV: who are Gulliver’s companions in his journey this time?
Robert Purefoy, Captain Pocock of Bristol and fifty hands overall.
What is the main purpose of his journey this time?
He is being grown weary of a surgeon’s employment at sea and had a chance to be Captain of the
Adventure.
How do his sailors treat him?
They rush into his carbin, and bind his hand and foot, threaten to throw him overboard, if he
offer to stir. When he tell them he is their prisoner, and would submit, they still make him swear
to do, and then unbind him, only fastening one of his legs with a chair near his bed, and place a
sentry at his door with his piece charged, who is commanded to shoot him dead if he attempt his
liberty. They send him down victuals and drink, and take the government of the ship to
themselves.
4. What does Gulliver do when he is left in the island?
He resolve to deliver himself to the first savages he should meet, and purchase his life from them
by some bracelets, glass rings, and other toys, which sailors usually provide themselves with in
those voyages, and whereof he has some about him.
What are the characteristics of the island?
It is an island that Gulliver did not know the name. The land is divided by long rows of trees, not
regularly planted, but naturally growing; there is great plenty of grass, and several fields of oats.
What creatures does he encounter in the island?
The ugly monster.
What are their features?
Their shape is very singular, and deformed. Their heads and breasts are convered with a thick
hair, some frizzled and others lank; they have beards like goats, and a long ridge of hair down
their backs, and the fore parts of their legs and feet; but the rest of their bodies are bare, so that
the narrator might see their skins, which are of a brown buff color. They have no tails, nor any
hair at all on their buttocks, except about the anus.They climb high trees, as nimbly as a squirrel,
for they have strong extended claws before and behind, terminating in sharp points, and hooded.
They would often spring, and bound, and leap with prodigious agility. The female are not so
large as the males; they have long lank hair on their heads, and only a sort of down on the rest of
their bodies, except about the anus, and pudenda. Their dugs hang between their forefeet, and
often reach almost to the ground as they walk. Their hair of both sexes is of several colors,
brown, red, blacks, and yellow.

5. What is the horses’ attitude to Gulliver when he encounters them?

“The horse started a little when he came near me, but soon recovering himself, looked full in my
face with manifest tokens of wonder; he viewed my hands and feet, walking round me several
times.”
What does he think about them?
He thinks the horse has a very mild aspect, never offering the least violence.

6. When entering the building, which is the horses’ house, what does Gulliver think of when he
sees the hosts?
Firstly, Gulliver thinks that the house must belong to some person of great note among the
horses, because there appear so much ceremony before he could gain admittance. But, that a man
of quality should be served all by horses, is still beyond his comprehension. After that, Gulliver
díscover that the owner of the house is a horse, which is a big shock for him.
Who else does he see in addition to the hosts?
Yahoo.
What is the relationship between these creatures to the hosts?
Yahoo are used as pets and a mean of transport for the hosts.

7. What is the food do the Yahoos eat?

Ass’s flesh.

8. How does Gulliver finally find food for him?

He observed a cow passing by; whereupon he pointed to her, and expressed a desire to let him go
and milk her. Then he was led to a good store of milk lay in earthen and wooden vessels, after a
very orderly and cleanly manner.
While they had dinner, the master taught him the names of oats, milk, fire, water, and some
others. He considered that he could contrive to make a kind of bread, which might be sufficient
with milk to keep him alive. Then, he pronouned the word oats in their tongue called hlunnh two
or three times so that the horse could understand. The horse immediately ordered a white mare-
servant of his family to bring him a good quantity of oats in a sort of wooden tray. And he had
the ingredient to make bread by himself.
What are those kinds of food?
Milk and bread.

II. Voltaire
1. What kinds of genre are Voltaire’s writings of?
Tragedy, epic, history, philosophy, fiction.
What genre is his Candide considered to be?
Philosophy fiction.

2. Who is the target Voltaire aims at to satirize in his Candide?

Candide mocks both the artificial order of fiction.

III. Rousseau
1. What is the similarity between Voltaire’s Candide and Rousseau’s Confessions in terms of the
characters described in their works?
The two characters both have internal struggles to express their inner desires though being
constrained by societal norms and expectations.

2. What happened after the narrator was born?

His mother died.
How does his father react to that?
His father was inconsolable. “He believed that he saw his wife again in me, without being able to
forget that it was I who had robbed him for her; he never embraced me without my perceiving,
by his sighs and the convulsive manner in which he clasped me to his breast, that a bitter regret
was mingled with his caresses, which were on that account only the more tender.”

3. What happens to the narrator when he is a boy at the age of 8?

As Mademoiselle Lambercier had the affection of a mother for them, and sometimes carried it so
far as to inflict upon them the punishment of children when they had deserved it. For some time
she was content with threats, and this threat of a punishment that was quite new to him appeared
very terrible; but, after it had been carried out, he found the reality less terrible than the
expectation; and, what was still more strange, this chastisement made him still more devoted to
her who had inflicted it.
And what is the result of this situation?
He had found in the pain, even in the disgrace, a mixture of sensuality which had left him less
afraid tha desirous of experiencing it again from the same hand. Furthermore, this childish
punishment disposed of his tates, his desires, his passions and his own self for the remainder of
his life, and that in a manner exactly contrary to that which should have been the natural result.
How does he become cynical?
“When my feelings were once inflamed, my desires so went astray that, limited to what I had
already felt, they did not trouble themselves to look for anything else. In spite of my hot blood,
which had been inflamed with sensuality almost for my borth, I kept myself free from everything
taint until the age when the coldest and most sluggish temperaments begin to develop. In
torments for a long time, without knowing why, I devoted with burning glances all the pretty
women I met; my imagination unceasingly recalled them to me, only to make use of them in my
own fashion, and to make of them so many Mlles Lambercier.”

4. What are the two contrasted characteristics the narrator feels inside of him when he thinks
of his own personality?
A very ardent temperament, lively and tumultuous passions and Slowly developed and confused
ideas, which never present themselves until it is too late.
What is his activity affected by them?
Conversation: He exhibits tolerably sound judgment, penetration, even fitnesse, if he is not
hurried; with sufficient leisure he can compose excellent impromptus; but he has never said or
done anything worthy of notice on the spur of the moment.
Alone and at work: His ideas arrange themselves in his head with almost incredible difficulty;
they circulate in it with uncertain sound, and ferment till they excite and hit him, and make his
heart beat fast; and, in the midst of this excitement, he sees nothing clearly and is unable to write
a single word. He is up obliged to wait. Hence comes the extreme difficulty which he finds in
writing. His manuscripts, scatched, smeared, muddled and almost illegible, bear witness to the
trouble they have cost him.

5. How does the narrator describe his feeling of uncertainty in his mind?
In the midst of his studies, in the course of a life as blameless as a man could have led, the fear of
hell still frequently troubled him. He asked himself: “In what state am I? If I were to die this
moment, should I be damned?”. Always fearful, and a prey to cruel uncertainty, he had recourse
to the most laughable expedients to escape from it, for which he would unhesitatingly have
anyone locked up as a madman if he saw that madman doing as he did.

What is the action he uses to test his feeling one day when he is having meditation on this
subject?
It occurred to him to draw a prognostic from it to calm his anxiety. He said to himself: “I will
throw this stone at the tree opposite; if I hit it, I am saved; if I missed it, I am damned.”

Writing
Myles, S. 2012, ‘The Polticial Implications of Gulliver 's Travels’, XULAneXUS, vol. 10, no. 1,
pp. 11-15.
The article discusses about the political implications of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels by
analyzing the use of satire to show the need for reason during the eighteenth century
Enlightenment.
Fernandes, M. 2001, ‘Economics and literature: an examination of Gulliver's Travels’, Journal
of Economic Studies,Vol. 28 No. 2, 2001, pp. 92-105.

The articles examines to what extenteconomic philosophy can contribute to the understanding of
Gulliver's Travels,and whateconomists can learn from Swift's extravagant digressions.

Brady, F. 1978, ‘Vexations and Diversions: Three Problems in "Gulliver's Travels"’, The
University of Chicago Press, vol. 75, no. 4, pp. 346-367.
The article examines three problems in "Gulliver's Travels” of Jonathan Swift.