Gulliver's Boastfulness

For this week’s significant passage, I’ve chosen something that highlights Gulliver’s character. In class on Tuesday we talked about the many accounts of Gulliver’s boastfulness, this passage eludes to that particular idea. The passage is paragraph one of Chapter IV on page 162.

In this paragraph, Gulliver talks about how he wants to leave Laputa. He claims that he wasn’t given enough attention. He was upset when they weren’t vastly interested in his journeys, but rather his knowledge of math and science. This adds to Gulliver’s conceited character; just because they weren’t infatuated with him like those in Brobdingnag he got upset. With each journey, I believe Gulliver’s head is getting bigger and bigger. It’s almost to the point that when he arrives to a new location he expects to be worshiped or in high regard among the people. You can see this increasing throughout his travels. In Lilliput he wasn’t boastful. However as his time passed in Brobdingnag, his head got much bigger. An example is when he tried to jump over cow dung in the road. His arrogance peaks at Laputa when he and his travels aren’t marveled at and he gets extremely upset. It’ll be interesting to see if this trend continues.