In the villain country, he is the giant mountain with huge food, infinite strength, mighty courage, and omnipotent. You can march under your crotch and you can tug ships with your bare hands. The trip will attract the enthusiastic crowd, and the scene will be like the arrival of the king.
In the adult country, he was just a three-inch doll who could speak human words and simulate movements, rowing in a wooden sink, swimming in a silver bowl of cheese, forcibly carried away by monkeys to feed, snatched cookies by thrushes, and later taken away by eagles as turtles shrunk in their shells and thrown into the sea.
The Flying Island Nation visits the "Astronomer's Cave" and talks with the ghosts; HuiHuaGuo makes friends with the horses and talks about human society with the gray horses.
Who is he?
He is gulliver, the protagonist of "Gulliver's Travels----- an adventurous, tortuous and rich traveler.
Gulliver's Travels is a masterpiece by British writer Jonathan Swift, a novel full of bizarre imaginations. The novel is clued by the experience of the four adventures of the surgeon Gulliver, which consists of four parts: "Adventures in the Villain Country", "Adventures in the Adult Country", "Travels in the Flying Island Country", and "Travels in the Huihua Country"
The famous British writer George Orwell once said: "If I were to open a bibliography of six books to keep even if other books were destroyed, I would definitely include Gulliver's Travels." ”
In 1726, Gulliver's Travels was first published in England and sold 10,000 copies in three weeks. It has been translated into dozens of languages, widely circulated in countries around the world, and has become one of the required reading books for our new language curriculum.
Imagination is more important than knowledge, because knowledge is limited, and imagination encapsulates everything in the world, drives progress, and is the source of the evolution of knowledge.
———— Einstein
First, the imagination is rich and colorful, the plot is twisted and bizarre
Reading this novel, you are always attracted and infected by the author's colorful imagination and twisting and bizarre plot.
I often think of such interesting scenes:
Gulliver lay on the ground, five or six little men dancing in the palms of his hands.
In the military exercise of the villain country, gulliver the giant generally stood there, legs as far apart as possible, infantry in a row of twenty-four men, cavalry sixteen in a row, beating the drum and raising the flag, armed with a spear from his crotch.
In the villain country, Gulliver is more or less with a sense of superiority, no matter in terms of size, strength, wisdom, Gulliver is a strong man, he always does not let the members of the villain country feel threatened.
However, in the adult country, Gulliver became a true villain.
Everything is big in the kingdom of adults. Cats are three times the size of bulls, monkeys are like elephants, apples are like beer barrels, and even hailstones are 1800 times larger than in Europe. The water was less than the giant's knees, so Gulliver was often taken out by his nanny, Glendacliff, in smaller boxes.
The huge gap in identity made Gulliver unable to accept it for a while. In order to survive, he was reduced to a three-inch doll who could speak human words and simulate movements, and was used as a cash cow by the kulaks. Later, he was sold to the palace to win the favor of the king and queen, but he was jealous of the courtiers, who stuffed him into an empty bone and could not move, and threw him into a silver bowl with cheese and almost choked to death.
Bold imagination and strange ideas are a major feature of this novel. So, how does the author behave?
1. A variety of writing techniques are cleverly mixed, the language is vivid and the content is rich.
When Gulliver first arrived in the villain country, in order to tie up his behemoth, the villain country spent a lot of manpower and material resources.
"They erected eighty pillars around me. The workers tied my neck, hands, body and legs with bandages, and then used ropes the thickness of the bandages to send the bandages to the pulleys at the top of the wooden pillars. It took nearly three hours for nine hundred strong men to pull the ropes and lift me up and put me on the machine. ”
"My whole body was bound by ropes, and fifteen hundred half-tall imperial horses from four villages dragged me with great momentum toward the capital half a mile away."
The use of numbers highlights the smallness, accuracy, image and intuitiveness of human beings and various things in the villain country.
"Although the royal horse was very well trained, when it saw me, it was like bumping into a shaking mountain, and it was startled to see its front hooves hanging in the air and screaming."
The use of metaphors and exaggerations vividly and vividly portrays Gulliver's image of the Giant Mountain in the villain country, and even the well-trained Imperial Horse, who is accustomed to seeing big scenes, cannot help but be surprised.
"I have seen with great interest a cook grooming the feathers of a lark that is not the size of an ordinary fly, and I have seen a young girl holding a thread so thin that it is too thin to be seen to wear a needle that is too small to be seen."
This paragraph uses an analogy to convey the small and thin image of the lark and needle of the villain country intuitively, giving people a deep impression.
Throughout the novel, the author creates a relaxed and pleasant reading atmosphere through the use of metaphor, anthropomorphism, exaggeration, analogy and other rhetorical techniques, and the language is witty and humorous, which makes people can't help but be funny, and will naturally be attracted to continue reading.
2. Appropriate detailed description, the glue between reality and fantasy.
"I ventured to unscrew the screws that had nailed the chair to the floor, moved the chair under the skylight, and fixed the chair with the screws. I climbed into my chair, kept my mouth as close to the window as possible, and shouted for help in every language I knew. Then I tied the handkerchief to the cane I carried with me, stuck it out of the window, and shook it several times in the air. ”
The series of verbs "twist, move, climb, pull, tie, stretch, shake" describe the various actions gulliver made for rescue, the impatient mood, the desperate struggle are vividly expressed, and it is the real reaction of anyone in trouble, subjective image, reasonable, dreamlike.
In addition, when he first came to HuiHuaguo to see "Yehu", he portrayed the appearance, actions, and behavior of "Yehu" realistically, giving people a deep impression and paving the way for promoting the development of the plot.
Second, the pungent irony is described in the narrative
The plot of the novel is colorful and fascinating, and it is more suitable for teenagers to read. If you just think of this novel as an interesting fairy tale, you would be sorely mistaken. The significance of this book has gone beyond the scope of "children's books", and to a large extent, the author also uses this novel to express dissatisfaction and satire on the rulers of the British dynasty.
The satire of reality is everywhere in the novel.
The dispute between the "Big Endists" and the "Little Endians" satirizes the senseless dispute between Protestantism and Catholicism in British society at that time over ecclesiastical rituals.
The selection of officials in the form of "rope dance" and "jumping" satirizes the corruption of British politics at that time.
"Their goal is that, after applying these new methods and tools, one person can do the work of ten people, can build a palace within a week, that the goods will last and will never be destroyed, that all the fruits on the ground will ripen as soon as we want, and that we will receive a hundred times more goods than before."
Monso di was one of the few sober people in Laugdor who could see the facts, and used his mouth to satirize flashy and unrealistic fantasies.
The image setting of "Yehu" in the novel, delicious and lazy, insatiable, drunk and absurd, is a concentrated satire of the social and political life and bad atmosphere in Britain at that time.
3. Introduction to the background of the writing
Jonathan Swift's essays are known for their humor and satire. One of his political treatises exposing government corruption directly prompted the anguish between Britain and France at that time. Later, the Queen of England and her dignitaries feared Swift's influence and expelled him from London.
After arriving in Dublin, Swift actively participated in the Irish people's struggle for independence and freedom, and successively published a series of highly militant articles anonymously, calling on the Irish people to persist in the struggle and refuse to use the half-penny copper coins minted by British merchants who wanted to make huge profits. When he was arrested by the authorities for his anonymous works, the Irish people protected him at every turn, and it was in this context that Jonathan Swift created Gulliver's Travels, a representative work that satirized the darkness of British politics and the brutality of colonial rule, exposing the exploitative nature of the ruling class's mercenary interests.