Gulliver's Travels: A Signature Performance by David Hyde Pierce recap

Ship's surgeon Lemuel Gulliver survives four extraordinary voyages. In Lilliput he is a giant among miniature courtiers, helps defeat an invasion, then flees when court enemies arrange his punishment. In Brobdingnag he is a vulnerable curiosity among giants; a loving girl protects him, while the king's questions expose the violence and corruption behind Gulliver's proud description of England. His third journey reaches the abstracted mathematicians of flying Laputa, the futile inventors of Lagado, a land where the dead can be questioned, and immortals condemned to endless decline. On his fourth voyage, rational horses called Houyhnhnms rule degraded humanlike Yahoos. Gulliver embraces the horses' ordered life and grows disgusted with humanity, but their assembly expels him as a dangerous Yahoo. Rescued by the humane Portuguese captain Don Pedro, he returns to England physically safe but unable to tolerate his family. He ends his account preferring horses to people, his valid criticism of human vice hardened into alienation and pride.

English surgeon Lemuel Gulliver takes a position at sea and survives a shipwreck by swimming to an unknown shore. He wakes bound by people only a few inches tall. The Lilliputians feed him, move him to their capital, search his possessions, and gradually negotiate the terms under which the dangerous giant may have limited freedom. Gulliver cooperates, learns their language, and entertains the imperial court, whose officials win office and favor through hazardous performances. Reldresal explains that Lilliput is divided between factions associated with high and low heels and is threatened by neighboring Blefuscu. The two states are at war over the officially required end from which an egg must be broken. Gulliver is grateful for improved treatment, but his liberty is tied to articles requiring him to serve the emperor, including assistance against Blefuscu.

Gulliver wades across the channel to Blefuscu, seizes most of its fleet, and brings the ships back to Lilliput. He refuses the emperor's further demand to reduce Blefuscu to a province, beginning a loss of favor. He later extinguishes a palace fire by urinating on the building, saving it while offending the empress and violating a law. Court enemies assemble charges based on these acts and on his friendly contact with Blefuscu. Warned that the intended sentence is blinding followed by a reduction of food, Gulliver escapes to Blefuscu. There he finds a full-sized abandoned boat, repairs it, and sails away. An English ship rescues him and returns him to his family with tiny animals as evidence. Although the voyage has made him money, he soon goes to sea again, leaving Lilliput's grand ambitions to be measured against the physical smallness of its rulers.

On his next voyage Gulliver is left ashore when his companions flee from a land of giants. A farmer in Brobdingnag finds him and brings him home. The farmer's daughter, whom Gulliver calls Glumdalclitch, protects, clothes, and teaches him. Everyday animals and household objects become grave dangers at his new scale. Seeing an opportunity, the farmer exhibits Gulliver for paying crowds until the exhausting schedule weakens him. At the royal court the queen buys Gulliver and employs Glumdalclitch as his caretaker. The king and scholars accept that he is a rational being rather than a mechanical toy. Gulliver receives a specially built traveling box and a place at court, where his size makes him dependent on others. He describes Brobdingnag's immense capital and countryside while adjusting to life as an entertaining but vulnerable miniature person.

Life at the Brobdingnagian court repeatedly exposes Gulliver to dangers that would be trivial at home, including animals, weather, and the malice of a court dwarf. He nevertheless takes pride in demonstrating English customs. In long conversations he explains Parliament, the courts, warfare, finance, and recent history to the king. The king's questions identify greed, faction, and violence beneath Gulliver's patriotic presentation. Hoping to impress him, Gulliver offers the secret of gunpowder and describes its military uses; the horrified king forbids him to mention it again. During a coastal journey, an eagle carries off Gulliver's traveling box and drops it into the sea. Sailors aboard an English vessel recover him. His stories and possessions persuade the captain that his account is genuine, and Gulliver returns home. For a time he has difficulty readjusting his sense of size, treating ordinary people as if they were tiny and fragile.

Gulliver's third expedition ends when pirates seize his ship and set him adrift. He is rescued by Laputa, a flying island whose ruling inhabitants devote themselves to music and mathematics but need attendants to interrupt their constant abstractions. The island moves by magnetic force and gives its king a means of coercing the territories below. Gulliver descends to Balnibarbi and stays with Lord Munodi, whose productive traditional estate is despised as backward. The surrounding country has been impoverished by reformers trained at the Academy of Projectors in Lagado. Gulliver tours the academy and sees researchers pursuing elaborate schemes that consume labor and resources without useful results, including attempts to reverse ordinary processes of manufacture and agriculture. The contrast between sophisticated theory and damaged daily life extends the voyages' examination of expertise detached from judgment.

After further tours of Lagado's speculative projects, Gulliver visits Glubbdubdrib, whose governor can summon the dead. Conversations with historical figures convince him that received history often glorifies corruption and conceals the causes of public events. In Luggnagg he learns of the Struldbrugs, people born immortal. He initially imagines that endless life would bring wisdom and wealth, but discovers that they continue to age, becoming isolated, infirm, and legally restricted while generation follows generation without them. Gulliver then travels through Japan, secures passage, and returns to England. The third voyage has offered wonders without a single ideal society: Laputa's intellect is politically oppressive and practically useless, Lagado's innovation ruins the country, access to the past undermines official history, and immortality proves to be permanent decline rather than an escape from death.

Gulliver becomes captain of a merchant ship, but mutineers abandon him on another unknown coast. He is attacked by filthy humanlike creatures called Yahoos and rescued by intelligent horses, the Houyhnhnms. A gray Houyhnhnm takes him home, where Gulliver learns the language and tries to distinguish himself from the local Yahoos. His master has difficulty understanding lying, government, war, law, and other institutions Gulliver describes. As Gulliver explains European conflicts, professions, class, money, and colonial expansion, his attempted defense of civilization increasingly exposes violence and fraud. The Houyhnhnm identifies human reason as a tool used in the service of Yahoo appetites. Gulliver adopts this judgment, admires the horses' rational social order, and becomes ashamed of his physical kinship with the creatures they govern.

Gulliver studies the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms' customs, embracing a life organized around reason, moderation, and communal duty. At the horses' general assembly, however, his master's account of a teachable Yahoo raises concern. The assembly requires Gulliver to leave, since his intelligence could make a creature of his kind especially dangerous. Devastated, he builds a canoe and departs. Sailors from a Portuguese ship find him, and Captain Don Pedro de Mendez treats him kindly even as Gulliver recoils from human contact. Don Pedro ensures his safe return to England. Gulliver cannot bear the smell or touch of his wife and children and spends much of his time with horses, whose company reminds him of the Houyhnhnms. He presents his narrative as truthful and criticizes conquest disguised as discovery, but remains deeply estranged from humanity. His travels end with genuine insight into political vanity and cruelty joined to an obsessive disgust that prevents reconciliation with his own kind.

The Houyhnhnms' assembly decides that Gulliver, because he resembles a Yahoo despite his education, cannot remain in their country. He reluctantly builds a small boat and leaves the household he has come to revere. Portuguese sailors find him, and their captain, Don Pedro de Mendez, treats him generously despite Gulliver's disgust at human company. Returned to England, Gulliver is unable to resume ordinary family life: he recoils from his wife and children because they remind him of the Yahoos, and he prefers spending time with horses. He writes his travels as a corrective to false and self-serving voyage literature, denies that he has invented his account, and reflects bitterly on colonial conquest. His final position is not one of restored balance. The voyages have exposed vanity and brutality in the societies he visited and in Europe, but his worship of Houyhnhnm reason has also left him isolated, proud of his own supposed freedom from pride, and estranged from the humans closest to him.