Anyone who makes a statement about Swift's Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver … must soon expect to be confronted by a counter-statement perhaps equally plausible. That is the nature of Swift's book. It studies paradox and dilemma. The present monograph is nevertheless rash enough to aim at several specific goals. First, it seeks to focus upon the extraordinary narrative and imaginative achievement of the Travels which has too often been pushed to the margins of debate by a body of criticism largely concerned with satiric intention and final effect. That kind of criticism is, of course, provoked by the text and would have given Swift much wry satisfaction. The hermeneutic battles, especially on the significance of Part IV, are of great interest, yet they take us surprisingly far from the reading experience of the Travels upon which final interpretation must, in the last analysis, rest.

Secondly, I argue that the centre of Swift's art in this book is an ironic viewpoint: to be specific, the purposely unpredictable variation in relation between Gulliver and the reader, sometimes near identification, sometimes morally distanced. This sequence of significant involvement and detachment, evolved and intensified as it is, is a function of the complementary relation of Part and Part. The continuity of Gulliver as a simple and knowable character is essential to this, for change cannot be recognized as significant without a thread of continuity. The changing relation between Gulliver and reader is what makes the Travels so much more than merely a devastating attack on ‘that Animal called man’ which we might witness with shock, wonder and distaste. Swift's handling of Gulliver has a rhetorical design on the reader, lies in ambush for us, making the judgement of others quite inescapably and painfully the judgement of ourselves, and making us undergo all the emotions, gratifying or mortifying, of judging and being judged. It is tempting to argue that, by virtue of its ironic viewpoint, Gulliver's Travels is a landmark in literature. But here the Cervantes of Don Quixote has come before. Rather the Travels is a landmark for the power with which it turns ironic viewpoint against passivities and complacencies of its readers.