Summary of Gulliver’s Travels Part 3 Chapter 9

We have decided to create the most comprehensive English Summary that will help students with learning and understanding.

Summary of Gulliver’s Travels Part 3 Chapter 9

Summary of Gulliver’s Travels Part 3 Chapter 9

The narrator returns to Maldonada. He sails to the kingdom of Luggnagg. The narrator is confined. He is sent to the court. The manner of his admittance and the king’s great levity to his subjects are described.

Gulliver finally left Glubbdubdrib and headed for Luggnagg. He arrived in Luggnagg on 21 April 1708. Gulliver started speaking to a customs officer in Luggnagg, where he pretended to be Dutch, since Gulliver’s eventual destination was Japan and the Japanese would only allow Dutch traders access to their harbours.

Gulliver was detained in Luggnagg by red tape, so he hired an interpreter who spoke both Luggnagg and Balnibarbi and answered frequent questions about his travels and the countries he had seen.

Eventually, Gulliver was granted audience with the King of Luggnagg and was given lodging and an allowance. He learned that subjects were expected to lick the floor as they approached the king and that the king sometimes got rid of opponents in the court by coating the floor with poison.

Gulliver exchanged ritual greetings with the king and then spoke to him through his interpreter. The king really liked Gulliver: he gave him some money and let him stay at the palace. Gulliver lived in Luggnagg for three months, but decided that, overall, it would be safer to go home to his wife and children.

Summary of Gulliver’s Travels Part 3 Chapter 8

We have decided to create the most comprehensive English Summary that will help students with learning and understanding.

Summary of Gulliver’s Travels Part 3 Chapter 8

Summary of Gulliver’s Travels Part 3 Chapter 8

A further account of Glubbdubdrib. Ancient and modem history is corrected.

Gulliver set apart one day to speak with the most venerated people in history, starting with Homer and Aristotle. A ghost informed Gulliver that later scholars who commented on their works had horribly misrepresented the meaning of those authors to posterity. Gulliver also talked to a number of thinkers dealing with the nature of the universe, including the French philosophers Rene Descartes and Pierre Gassendi.

He asked Descartes and Gassendi to describe their systems to Aristotle, who freely acknowledged his own mistakes while pointing out that systems of nature would always vary from age to age as each new age of humanity comes up with a new system to explain nature.

Gulliver also met most of the Emperors of Rome. Then he moved on to the more recently deceased ones. He saw plenty of evidence of family degeneration into stupidity and lying. Speaking to the ghosts of the recent past showed Gulliver exactly how much lying goes around and how much history had been manipulated to look better (or worse) than it really was.

Gulliver wanted to find out how people had gotten their official and court positions and found that it was through horrible means: bribery, lying, flattery, oppression, treason and poisoning. The only really great services done to the state had been by people who history calls traitors and criminals. In fact, he also realized that this kind of hypocrisy was present even in Rome, once the Empire started to grow rich and luxurious. The introduction of similar wealth to England had made the English people progressively less healthy. Total corruption had caused England to grow repulsive over the last 100 years.

Summary of Gulliver’s Travels Part 3 Chapter 7

We have decided to create the most comprehensive English Summary that will help students with learning and understanding.

Summary of Gulliver’s Travels Part 3 Chapter 7

Summary of Gulliver’s Travels Part 3 Chapter 7

The narrator leaves Lagado: arrives at Maldonado. No ship ready. He takes a short voyage to Glubbdubdrib. His reception by the governor is described.

Gulliver claimed that Balnibarbi was situated in the Pacific, towards the west of California, which had not yet been charted. To the north of Lagado lay the island of Luggnagg, which was not far southeast of Japan. These two countries had trade relations, so Gulliver decided to go to Luggnagg, sail for Japan and then head for Europe. Gulliver tried to travel to Luggnagg, but he found that no ship available. Since he had to wait a month before a boat would arrive at the port city of Maldonada to take him to Luggnagg, he was advised to take a trip to Glubbdubdrib, the island of sorcerers. These sorcerers were very private and only married among each other. The Governor of Glubbdubdrib could raise the dead, but only for one day and he couldn’t call them back again until three months had gone by.

Gulliver visited the governor of Glubbdubdrib, who asked Gulliver about his adventures. He found that servants who attended the governor were spirits who could appear and disappear. After ten days on Glubbdubdrib, Gulliver became so familiar with the sight of ghosts that apprehension was replaced by curiosity. This led the Governor to make him an offer: Gulliver could speak to any ghost he chose and to as many as he wanted to.

The one thing he had to promise was that he would only ask them questions about their own time. Gulliver chose Alexander the Great, who told him that he had died, not from poison, but from excessive drinking. He then saw the Carthaginian general Hannibal and the Roman leaders Caesar, Pompey and Brutus. Gulliver didn’t want to bore the reader with a complete list of who he spoke to, but most of his conversations were with great men of history who had killed tyrants and had fought for liberty.

Summary of Gulliver’s Travels Part 3 Chapter 6

We have decided to create the most comprehensive English Summary that will help students with learning and understanding.

Summary of Gulliver’s Travels Part 3 Chapter 6

Summary of Gulliver’s Travels Part 3 Chapter 6

A further account of the academy. The narrator proposes some improvements, which are honourably received.

Gulliver then visited professors who were studying issues of government. He sarcastically referred to them as being ‘wholly out of their senses’. They proposed schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favourites based on their wisdom, capacity and virtue; of teaching ministers to consider the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities, eminent services; of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employments, persons qualified to exercise them, with many other ‘wild’, ‘impossible’ schemes.

However, not all of them were so visionary. One of the political projectors suggested that, if a political assembly is like a body, then it stands to reason that cures for the body might also cure problems in the assembly itself. So, he suggested that all senators should receive regular medical treatment to make sure that they didn’t fall into greed, corruption, or bribery. He also suggested various ‘cures’ for the weak memories and poor decision-making of senators. He also opined that, if political parties became violent, a hundred leaders from each political party could be taken and their brains split in such a manner that the brain may be equally divided and the portion cut-off to be interchanged, applying each to the head of his opposite party-man. In this way, each skull would have half a conservative and half a liberal brain in it. Then they could argue it out among themselves.

To raise money, there was a proposal to tax everything bad in a man, as decided by his neighbours. A second fellow suggested that they tax everything good about a man, again, as assessed by his neighbours. The problem was ensuring that jealous neighbours would not unjustly accuse each other. Another claimed that women should be taxed according to their beauty and skill at dressing.

To choose who would serve in high office, a professor proposed a raffle, which would keep hope alive among senators who might otherwise turn against the crown. Another professor advised that one could tell if a man was plotting against the government by measuring and analyzing his excrement. Gulliver offered to tell this professor about a land he had seen, ‘Tribnia’, which its residents called ‘Langden’.

Gulliver informed them that the plots in ‘Tribnia’ were generally hatched by informers who wanted to raise their own reputations by making up stuff. Usually, the accusers decided who to target in advance so they could raid the homes of the accused. There, they stole all the letters belonging to the accused so they could find ‘proof of treason by assigning special meanings and fake codes to the words of the accused. If making false allegations failed, these people had two other methods even more effectual. They could decipher all initial letters into political meanings. Or by transposing the letters of the alphabet in any suspected paper, they could give it any meaning they chose, thereby, they laid open the deepest designs of a discontented party.

Gulliver grew tired of the academy and began to yearn for a return to England.

Summary of Gulliver’s Travels Part 3 Chapter 5

We have decided to create the most comprehensive English Summary that will help students with learning and understanding.

Summary of Gulliver’s Travels Part 3 Chapter 5

Summary of Gulliver’s Travels Part 3 Chapter 5

The narrator is permitted to see the grand academy of Lagado. The academy is largely described as an area of the arts wherein the professors employ themselves.

The Royal Academy in Lagado was not an entire single building, but a continuation of several houses on both sides of a street, which were lying vacant and were purchased and applied to that use. Gulliver was received very kindly by the warden and spent many days at the academy, where there were at least 500 Projectors who came up with a variety of visionary, impracticable schemes. Gulliver met a man engaged in a project to extract sunbeams from cucumbers.

He also met a scientist trying to turn excrement back into food. Another was attempting to turn ice into gunpowder and was writing a treatise about the malleability of fire, hoping to have it published. An architect was designing a way to build houses from the roof down and a blind master was teaching his blind apprentices to mix colours for painters according to smell and touch. An agronomist was designing a method of ploughing fields with hogs by first burying food in the ground and then letting the hogs loose to dig it out.

Gulliver complained of colic and his guide led him into a room where a great physician, who was famous for curing that disease, resided. This doctor tried to cure patients by blowing air through them. Gulliver left this doctor trying to revive a dog, that he had killed, by supposedly curing it in this way.

On the other side of the academy there were people engaged in speculative learning. One professor had a class full of boys working from a machine that produced random sets of words. Using this machine, the teacher claimed, anyone could write a book on philosophy or politics. A linguist in another room was attempting to remove all the elements of language except nouns. Such pruning, he claimed, would make language more concise and prolong lives, since every word spoken was detrimental to the human body. Since nouns were only things, furthermore, it would be even easier to carry things and never speak at all. Another professor tried to teach mathematics by having his students eat wafers that had mathematical proofs written on them.