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from Part I - Personal
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 May 2024
Swift specialised in playing with distinctions between reason and unreason. This chapter focuses on two major works, A Tale of a Tub (1704) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726), in which Swift’s blurs the line between reason and unreason: firstly in ‘A Digression concerning the Original, the Use and Improvement of Madness in a Commonwealth’, and secondly in Gulliver’s fourth voyage to the Yahoos. Swift repeatedly engages in a sleight of hand, obliging readers to appreciate the ease with which reason can slip into madness. But in the voyage to the Yahoos, this chapter argues, readers find Gulliver’s self-loathing and misanthropy to be a step too far. Swift’s skill is to make his reader question their own perspectives and their own balance between reason and unreason.
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