Gulliver's Travels Prep Work

Victoria Becker
Gulliver's Travels Prep Work

A)
As I read Gulliver's Travels: Part I the questions I came up with were-
1. Why did the people of Lilliput give Gulliver a sleeping potion?
2. Why didn't the people of Lilliput kill/harm Gulliver? Why did they provide him with food and water?
3. Why did the people take him as a prisoner in the first place?
4. Why was Gulliver traveling alone? How did he come across these little people?
5. Why doesn't Swift include Gulliver's reaction to the little people? Gulliver seems too calm to have little tiny people playing hide and seek in his hair.
6. How do we know if the people of Lilliput are little people? What if Gulliver is just a giant?
7. What didn't Swift include a translation of the Lilliputian language?
8. Why hasn't Gulliver tried to escape?
9. Is Swift making fun of Gulliver and his lack of an attempt to escape?

These are the excerpts from the text that stood out to me:
pg. 654 "I could easily free myself... but fortune disposed me otherwise."
pg. 655 "However... appear to them."

*These quotations from the text stood out to me because the whole time I was wondering why Gulliver hasn't escaped. He says in these quotes that he could easily have gotten away but he wasn't sure that all the people were small or he didn't want them to shoot him with the arrows. But still, the arrows were probably the size of a toothpick and they only gave him blisters. A part of me thinks he is just lazy and liked the fact that these people were taking care of them. He didn't want to cause tension by trying to escape.

*Maybe Gulliver can be considered gullible because he is physically able to escape but he is content and trusts the people of Lilliput to let him be free. This was the only idea or thought that I could relate to satire because Swift could be saying that mankind is too easily duped and settles for less. Gulliver is content with the fact that people are feeding and treating him nicely. Maybe Swift is trying to say that man doesn't take enough risk when necessary. It kind of seems like Swift is making fun of Gulliver.

B)
Teaching Group- Victoria Becker, Eugene Aversa, Frankee Spinosi
I think our group work went really well the past couple days. Our group worked really well together and even came up with some of the same questions. Were all having trouble with interpreting the satire of the text but we came up with some possibilities. We wrote down what we wanted to include on our paper to teach. We didn't really focus on a topic to teach though. We mostly centered everything around the questions that we had. I think the questions are pretty basic because we haven't read the whole story.

C)
On Monday we will figure out a way to connect all the questions and excerpts that we have into a lesson. We also have to transfer the information onto a piece of large paper. I'm not really sure if we are going to talk about how it represents satire because that is the topic that our group struggled with. But we are going to work on how to present what we found in a "teaching manner".