Gulliver’s Travels is the magnum opus of satire in English literature, combining humorous wits and profound allegories by swelling, absurd, ludicrous scenarios to concretely present, through the use of the irony, the corruption of frictional politics accompanied by depraved humanity. Of the four books comprising this work, by far the most controversial satire of the contemporary Augustan-imitating piece has been the last: “A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms.”
In Book Four, the narrator, Gulliver, is deposited by mutineers on an island co-existed by two totally irreconcilable spices: Some are the Yahoos, being bestial nature, ravaged by rampant problems, such as cupidity, lust and vulgarity, made to be menial labors by the others – the Houyhnhnms. In stark contrast to the former, the latter are extremely rational, constituting a utopian paradise free from the problems plaguing man. When at first facing the humanlike animals as the Yahoos, Gulliver is stunned by such disagreeable and despicable animals, discharging their odious excrements on his head, while the ideal creatures, the Houynhnms, are not only orderly but judicious, having particularly inoffensive dung and living clean. The author, Swift, employs the drastic discrepancies toward the sanitation and civilization to unveil the prologue of the ironic travel.