A Tale of a Tub

Jonathan Swift

dec. 2013 · Vândut de Simon and Schuster

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A Tale of a Tub is one of the major works by the author of the celebrated Gulliver's Travels and is considered by many critics as one of the finest satires of the English tongue. The book's structure is divided into two entities: A tale and a series of digressions that have no relationship with the main tale. As long as the tale is concerned, it centers on three brothers named Peter, Martin and Jack, who represent respectively the three branches of Western Christianity: The Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church and other dissenting protestants such as Quakers, Presbyterians, etc. The narrative symbolically speaks about a will left by their father along with three coats that they have to cherish and maintain as they are. Yet, they do the opposite and make certain changes to their coats from the very beginning. Generally, Swift starts by overtly parodying religious excesses and bigotry to come to satirizing human nature in general and its tendency towards pride, credulity, hypocrisy and enthusiasm. The numerous digressions Swift embeds in the narrative are often related to literature, theology, human behavior and politics. Since religion and the State were closely intertwined at his time, Swift's work caused him serious problems among both churchmen and political rulers and greatly affected his reputation as a writer.

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Apparently doomed to an obscure Anglican parsonage in Laracor, Ireland, even after he had written his anonymous masterpiece, A Tale of a Tub (c.1696), Swift turned a political mission to England from the Irish Protestant clergy into an avenue to prominence as the chief propagandist for the Tory government. His exhilaration at achieving importance in his forties appears engagingly in his Journal to Stella (1710--13), addressed to Esther Johnson, a young protegee for whom Swift felt more warmth than for anyone else in his long life. At the death of Queen Anne and the fall of the Tories in 1714, Swift became dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. In Ireland, which he considered exile from a life of power and intellectual activity in London, Swift found time to defend his oppressed compatriots, sometimes in such contraband essays as his Drapier's Letters (1724), and sometimes in such short mordant pieces as the famous A Modest Proposal (1729); and there he wrote perhaps the greatest work of his time, Gulliver's Travels (1726). Using his characteristic device of the persona (a developed and sometimes satirized narrator, such as the anonymous hack writer of A Tale of a Tub or Isaac Bickerstaff in Predictions for the Ensuing Year, who exposes an astrologer), Swift created the hero Gulliver, who in the first instance stands for the bluff, decent, average Englishman and in the second, humanity in general. Gulliver is a full and powerful vision of a human being in a world in which violent passions, intellectual pride, and external chaos can degrade him or her---to animalism, in Swift's most horrifying images---but in which humans do have scope to act, guided by the Classical-Christian tradition. Gulliver's Travels has been an immensely successful children's book (although Swift did not care much for children), so widely popular through the world for its imagination, wit, fun, freshness, vigor, and narrative skill that its hero is in many languages a common proper noun. Perhaps as a consequence, its meaning has been the subject of continuing dispute, and its author has been called everything from sentimental to mad. Swift died in Dublin and was buried next to his beloved "Stella."