earticle

영어

In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift executes the ultimate colonial satire through his portrayal of Gulliver’s character in constant play between the opposite poles of a colonial Manichean allegory. The narrative theories of Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan and Roland Barthes unravel the intricacies of naive Gulliver’s vacillating identity from the colonial subtext of his story. Between the text and the story Gulliver thinks he is telling another story presents itself in the mind of the reader. That story offers insight into the root of Gulliver’s madness. This madness stems from his inability to continue vacillating between the roles of colonizer and colonized once his similarity to the Yahoo irreversibly fixes his own perception of himself as inferior Other. Gulliver’s eccentricities on his final return to England can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, his peculiarities anticipate psychotic symptoms in colonizers as described by Franz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. However, in Foucauldian terms, Gulliver’s madness can be interpreted as nothing more than a label of madness assigned him by the prevailing discourse of his homeland. In England, the discourse of superior human/inferior horse relegates the threat of Gulliver’s challenging discourse of superior Houyhnhnm/inferior Yahoo to the fringe of madness.