Jacobe: …Hierarchy and Power in Gulliver’s Travels 122 Society Cannot be Flat: Hierarchy and Power in Gulliver’s Travels.

In many of his prose works, Jonathan Swift carefully establishes the persona of the narrator and fictional author, who tells whatever tale he has in mind. Swift purposefully endows these men with particular traits and backgrounds, and Lemuel Gulliver, the fictional travelogue writer of Gulliver’s Travels, is no exception to this rule. In The Pen is Mightier than the Whore: Imperialism and Cultural Authority in Spenser and Swift, Lucille G. Appert uses Gulliver’s Travels to show how Swift uses his writings to reform society; this argument, however, is fundamentally flawed because Swift satirizes Gulliver’s own desire for social mobility by tormenting him with the persistence of social hierarchy. Swift controls Gulliver’s voice and makes him unreliable and untrustworthy while inserting Gulliver into a variety of social situations with ever-changing conventions. Gulliver proves an excellent translator in every complicated world in which he finds himself, but he continually seeks to improve his position in the hierarchy, to be on equal footing with the characters Swift establishes as his betters. The author wins the power struggle here, denying Gulliver’s attempts to change the status quo and thereby reinforcing it. Right from the start of the text Gulliver is clearly established as a self-conscious narrator