Nature Meets Fact and Fiction

Gulliver's Travels is full of fact and fiction, with loads of biased opinion about nature and society. While Gulliver tries to inform his Master (and the reader) about his society, he omits and adds truth and fiction. However the Houyhnhnms' ( more importantly, his Master) have no way of knowing anything but what he says. Therfore since the Houyhnhnms are beings of "reason" and very rational that have no conception of decit and dishonestey. This is owing to the fact they don't even have a word for lying in their language leading them to use "the thing which was not" (Swift 445-446). Through their discourse the two teach each other about society and nature. Gulliver inadvertently learns about how his society could improve and gleams insight into the wonderful way of the Houyhnhnms rational life. Moreover Gulliver's Master was informed of our "unrational" ways of life, often to the point of information overload. While both parties are trying to understand each other, it becomes obvious that Gulliver's master struggles with accepting Gulliver as something then a "Yahoo" (Swift 442). Gulliver himself is in denial about how he really is a verison of the Yahoos. Even in his early meeting of the Yahoos, Gulliver comes face to face with this fact but turns it into fiction in his head. Gulliver's first close up view of the Yahoos proves their likeness; "My horror and astonishment are not to be described, when I obseserved, in this abominable animal, a perfect human figure..." (Swift 442).