A Voyage to Lilliput

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When we last left our hero Gulliver, he’d been shipwrecked, but he managed to swim to an island, and when he woke up, he found himself strapped to the ground by hundreds of strings, with a small army — a very small army, as it turns out, not in number but in size — of human creatures no more than six inches tall, ready to fire their arrows into his face and his eyes. Now the question for the tiny people of Lilliput is, “What shall we do with him?” And here’s where Swift’s satire against human folly and presumption kicks into gear. We’ve got a situation we haven’t foreseen. What to do? It’s a question we often face, but people in authority face it all the time. There’s the right thing, and then there’s what we can get away with, or what we think we can get away with. Let’s see then how the Lilliputians begin to treat the Man-Mountain, as they call Gulliver!

The high and mighty Emperor of Lilliput addresses Gulliver for the first time

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