Gulivers Travels

Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift, tells the story of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon who has a number of rather extraordinary adventures. In Book I, Gulliver's ship is blown off course and he is shipwrecked. He wakes up flat on his back on the shore, and discovers that he cannot move; he has been bound to the earth by thousands of tiny crisscrossing threads. He soon discovers that his captors are tiny men of about six inches high; they are natives of the land of Lilliput.

In chapter four of Book I Gulliver begins to learn about the current Emperor's grandfather who initiated a new religion which demanded that believers break their eggs on the smaller end. Many Lilliputians refused to do so, as since time immemorial their belief had been to break their eggs on the larger end, and they insisted on their right to do so. This caused them to emigrate to Blefuscu, and now that country, reinforced by its new angry citizens, is planning an invasion against Lilliput.

Swift is saying that the argument between the Low-Heels and the High-Heels is ridiculous-almost as silly as the jihad between the Big-Enders and the Little-Enders. During Swift's lifetime, an equally high level of hostility existed between the various English divisions which considered themselves Protestant, and between the English Protestants collectively and the Catholics on the Continent. Swift, an Anglican clergyman himself, is clearly showing how ridiculous such opposition is among people who all admit to be followers of the same path.

Like any good satire, Gulliver's Travels cannot be read purely as an analogy, but by making the political and religious situations of the eighteenth century seem even more outlandish than they already were, Swift was able to make people see his views on said situations.