The Alienation Of The Characters In Gulliver's Travels

Jonathan Swift was a prominent writer in the 18^th century in Britain. During his lifetime, he created numerous works, including essays, collections of letters, narrative poems and novels, etc., which have greatly influenced the succeeding writers. Gulliver's Travels is his representative Utopian work, in which Gulliver is the narrative author. With Gulliver's descriptions of his adventurous experiences on his four voyages, this novel aims at reflecting various contradictions in the capitalist society in the 18 century Britain, exposing and repudiating the corrupted political systems of the British government, criticizing the colonial policies of expanding abroad and exploitation at home, and also eulogizing laborers' revolting spirit and just fights.As to this novel, many scholars have done massive researches, and have achieved a great success. However, their researches mainly focus on the sarcastic art and writing style. This thesis tries to apply Marx's theory of labor alienation and Erich Fromm's related alienation theory from the perspective of psychology as the theoretical bases for the analysis of the alienation of the characters in this novel, especially the analysis of the protagonist's alienation from two aspects: his "economic self and "political self. This thesis consists of an introduction, three chapters and a conclusion.The introduction presents briefly the process of choosing this topic, the main content and the structure of this thesis, and the originality of this topic.Chapter One introduces Jonathan Swift's life experiences, the main content of this novel, and some related criticisms about the author and the novel made abroad and at home at first, then provides a general introduction to the researches of alienation made in the light of philosophy, sociology and psychology, etc., and specializes in bringing forward the theoretical basis for this thesis, so that the feasibility of this study becomes natural.Chapter Two begins to analyze the universal and widespread alienation phenomena in this novel, in which the characters become the objects to be analyzed, especially in Books III and IV.Chapter Three affords a more detailed description about the process of the protagonist's alienation from two aspects: one is about his alienation as an "economic being," the other his awakening as a "political being."The last part is the conclusion. With a novel perspective of alienation, this thesis is an affirmation that Swift has enormous power in observing the society and shows fully his worries and speculations about the plights of human beings.Through a thorough analysis, this thesis then obtains its final conclusion: the characters in Gulliver's Travels are probably the earliest alienated images in the history of British literature, and Gulliver is probably one of the first typical alienated protagonists in the history of the British novel.