Read
Swift Build Background and Focus Your Reading 590
from Gulliver’s Travels
from Part 1: A Voyage to Lilliput 591-599 Due ____________
from Part 2: A Voyage to Brobdingnag 600-606 Due ____________
Set a Purpose:
Read to discover what kind of people populate the lands of Lilliput and Brobdingnag.
(What are their characteristics?) Try keeping notes.
Vocabulary (define all and study those marked with an asterisk)
censure*
civility
conjecture*
dexterity*
diminutive*
infallibly*
ligatures*
morose
panegyric
perfidiousness
pernicious*
prostrating
recapitulate*
retinue
schism*
solicitation*
Questions (Answer on a separate piece of paper)
A Voyage to Lilliput
1. How big are the Lilliputians?
2. What weapons do they inflict upon Gulliver?
3. Why do they build a stage?
4. Swift presents Gulliver’s experiences as though they actually happened in real places. What details does he include to make the story seem more real?
5. Why doesn’t Gulliver “seize forty or fifty” Lilliputians and dash them to the ground?
6. Paraphrase or summarize the passage from “His Excellency” to “be conveyed” (594), in which an official from the Emperor meets Gulliver.
7. What kind of person might Swift be satirizing by presenting the fantastical image of the six-inch representative of the king who claims royal authority over a giant twelve times his size?
8. What impressions do you get of Gulliver in the passage beginning “My gentleness and good behavior…”? How does he describe himself?
9. Why do politicians dance on the rope for the king?
10. What is he trying to say about political office in the paragraph beginning with “This diversion is only practiced…” (595)?
11. What does Gulliver mean when he states, “My gentleness and good behavior had gained so far on the Emperor and his court” and “I took all possible methods to cultivate this favorable disposition”?
12. Explain the reference to Flimnap falling on one of the king’s cushions in...