Gulliver’s host explains that the inhabitants follow the prescriptions of a learned academy in the city, where the scientists undertake such wholly impractical projects as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. He finds the farm fields in ruin and the people living in apparent squalor. Gulliver is permitted to leave the island and visit Lagado, the capital city of Balnibarbri. Laputa is the home of the king of Balnibarbri, the continent below it. Though they are greatly concerned with mathematics and with music, they have no practical applications for their learning. The people of Laputa all have one eye pointing inward and the other upward, and they are so lost in thought that they must be reminded to pay attention to the world around them. On Gulliver’s third voyage he is set adrift by pirates and eventually ends up on the flying island of Laputa. Gulliver in Brobdingnag, the land of giants. He flees to Blefuscu, where he finds a normal-size boat and is thus able to return to England. Eventually he falls out of favour and is sentenced to be blinded and starved. Later Gulliver extinguishes a fire in the royal palace by urinating on it. Gulliver captures Blefuscu’s naval fleet, thus preventing an invasion, but declines to assist the emperor of Lilliput in conquering Blefuscu. Gulliver is asked to help defend Lilliput against the empire of Blefuscu, with which Lilliput is at war over which end of an egg should be broken, this being a matter of religious doctrine. Political affiliations, for example, are divided between men who wear high-heeled shoes (symbolic of the English Tories) and those who wear low ones (representing the English Whigs), and court positions are filled by those who are best at rope dancing. They indulge in ridiculous customs and petty debates. The Lilliputians’ small size mirrors their small-mindedness. He is then taken to the capital city and eventually released. In the first one, Gulliver is the only survivor of a shipwreck, and he swims to Lilliput, where he is tied up by people who are less than 6 inches (15 cm) tall. The book is written in the first person from the point of view of Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon and sea captain who visits remote regions of the world, and it describes four adventures. Lemuel Gulliver in Lilliput, illustration from an edition of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
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