Paragraph 1: When Gulliver is faced with the morally perfect Houyhnhnms, Gulliver speaks of such terms as “lust, intemperance, malice and envy” that would be easy to contemplate to any normal being, but the Master Horse is unable to fulfil this seemingly easy task and can only understand with a demonstration of “suppositions”. The irony here is used to evidently mocking human morality as in other parts of the novel such as in book 2 and 1 where Gulliver mostly discusses the “power, government, war, law, punishment” in Europe with the respected leaders of their countries, Gulliver speaks of these sins whereas he cannot express those actions to the Houyhnhnms here. This emphasises the perfect morality of the horses and as they are only mere animals, …show more content…
He cannot understand that a “creature pretending to reason could be capable of such enormities” and comes to a conclusion that we were “fitted” with a “quality” to “increase our natural vices” instead of reason. The horse even admits that the “corruption of that faculty” could even be worse than the “brutality” of the creatures parallel to humans in that part of the novel (4), the Yahoos. There is a strong situational irony here as a horse, who is treated as the Yahoos are in Gulliver’s Travels, is nobler than Gulliver and, as the concept of a reasonable Yahoo is discombobulating, the horse concludes that Europeans are more dangerous than the Yahoos with connotations of savagery to display this. This mocks human pride and morality and shows our misunderstanding of how we actually appear. Again, this can be emphasised by the essay on Swift’s Moral Satire in Gulliver’s Travels when it displays the two perceptions: the “unillusioned perception of man as he actually is” and the “ideal” perception. This summarizes my points above as it emphasises humanity’s misinterpretation of how they appear