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Satirical Devices in Chapter 4 of Gulliver's Travels

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Satirical Devices in Chapter 4 of Gulliver's Travels

When you read Gulliver's Travels in the light of it being a satire, the stories are still humorous, but you realize that Swift was making a public statement about the affairs of England and of the human race as a whole. In the 4th chapter of the first part of this novel, we can find many rhetorical devices that prove that this work is a satirical novel. The first voyage captures the reader's attention on the way that Swift uses to apply to the real world a new scale, of much lower dimensions. This scale forces us to see this fictional world in a telescopically way. All this is an example of exaggeration and fantasy that is used in so many times during this novel. At the same time, Swift uses this new scale to convert physical smallness in moral smallness so making these topics smaller, Swift makes them look grotesque and insignificant, although at that time they were of vital importance. In this book, Swift by describing the ridiculous system of Lilliput's government, is satirizing the English system of government. He uses parallelisms that seem absurd at first glance but make more sense when you look at them carefully. We can see some details on the Lilliputian life which are references to political and religious life of Swift's time. There is a clear parallelism between the two worlds: this tiny world and Swift's world, which is an example of wit. Besides, It is not difficult to see that the two Parties fighting under the names of Tramecksan and Slamecksan named for the high or low of their heels, is alluding to the Tories and Whigs. This is also an example of indirectness, wit and parody. At the end of this chapter, Gulliver is told a story about the present king's grandfather cutting himself while breaking an egg, so the King at that time, issued an edict saying that everybody should break the eggs on the

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