The fourth voyage of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is easily read as an indictment of the human species because of the obvious satire toward the Yahoos, but a careful reading of the text indicates that Swift is just as satirical toward Gulliver and the Houyhnhnms, and that Gulliver’s idealized view of the Houyhnhnms’ rational approach to living is most assuredly not shared by Swift. Understanding the dichotomy between Gulliver’s and Swift’s opinions of the Houyhnhnms is important to a critical understanding of Part Four because it has been all too effortless and harmless up to this point to associate Gulliver’s point of view as being consistent with that of Swift’s.
Viewpoint becomes more problematic in Part Four, however, as the previously likable Gulliver devolves into a rather obnoxious misanthrope who becomes by the end quite clearly an object of ridicule. Although Swift has certainly suffered his share of epithets-some of them self-directed-as being a misanthrope, there actually is very little in any part of Gulliver’s Travels, including the fourth voyage, to indicate that he shares Gulliver’s ultimate opinion on the hopelessness of humanity. Gulliver remains true to his gullible self by being blinded to the downside of the Houyhnhnms’ rational philosophy, whereas the same cannot be said of Swift. The Houyhnhnms’ suffer greatly at the pen of Swift, though in a more subtle way than the Yahoos do and this has led to misunderstandings of the meaning of Gulliver’s confrontation with the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms.
For instance, the Houyhnhnms’ “have not the least idea of books or literature” (2436), which certainly seems questionable for a supposedly master race. The Houyhnhnms’ possess untold depths of arrogance and the inability to see beyond themselves. Because they cannot conceive of any country existing beyond the sea, they rest certain in the knowledge that no country exists (2436); they can’t understand how a human could possibly do mischief since humans can’t bite each other like horses or claw at each other like Yahoos, so therefore humans are incapable of killing each other in large numbers (2443); they can’t entertain any possibility of the use of knowledge which isn’t of any concrete use (2456). The Houyhnhnms’ are completely lacking in imagination and emotion and it’s very difficult to believe so imaginative and emotional a writer as Swift would view this as being the ideal manner of society as does his creation. Swift also understands, as Gulliver never seems to, that the Yahoos simply are not to be mistaken as humans. Gulliver should realize this since he wasn’t even able to recognize any human qualities in them whatever upon first viewing them.
Anyone still thinking that the Yahoos are equitable with human need only read the final three chapters of the book. Had Swift designed the Yahoos to stand in for humans, he would have carried on the satire by making the humans who rescue Gulliver resemble Yahoos. But they do not resemble Yahoos at all, except to Gulliver. Captain de Mendez is actually farther away from being a Yahoo than Gulliver himself. The critical implication of Gulliver’s actions after Part Four is that Gulliver once again has gone to a wondrous country and met wondrous inhabitants and yet still has come away blind, unable to learn anything from his adventures. Gulliver adopts the misanthrope approach to dealing with humans by only seeing the Yahoo in us because we more closely resemble them physically. Gulliver doesn’t understand what Swift understands, which is that we are all a little bit Yahoo and a little bit Houyhnhnm and that’s probably the best that’s available and the best we can ever hope for.
