Lemuel Gulliver

Lemuel Gulliver is the narrator and protagonist of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, published in 1726, a ship's surgeon whose four successive sea voyages carry him to a series of fantastical lands. He is shipwrecked among the six-inch-tall Lilliputians and drawn into their absurd court politics and wars with a neighboring island; later visits Brobdingnag, a land of giants sixty feet tall, where he is kept as a curiosity; then Laputa, a floating island of impractical philosophers and scientists; and finally the land of the Houyhnhnms, a society of rational, virtuous talking horses who rule over the brutish, degraded human-like Yahoos. Gulliver's matter-of-fact, credulous narration of each increasingly strange society serves as Swift's vehicle for satirizing English and European politics, science, class and human nature itself, and Gulliver returns from his final voyage so disillusioned with humanity that he can barely tolerate the company of his own family. Gulliver's Travels is regarded as one of the foundational works of English satire and an early influence on the development of science fiction and fantasy literature.