On Indeterminacies In Gulliver’s Travels

Gulliver’s Travels is the representative work of Jonathan Swift, a celebrated British writer in the eighteenth century. From the date of its publication, this novel has gained extensive attention and attracted worldwide critics and readers. Scholars have analyzed and interpreted it from different perspectives, focusing on the novel itself or the author himself, achieving numerous great achievements. But few of them have attempted to probe into the indeterminacies hidden in the novel from the perspective of deconstruction.Deconstruction fights against metaphysics and logocentrism. Deconstruction bitterly opposes all stiff and inflexible systems. Openness and indefiniteness are two remarkable characteristics of deconstruction. According to Derrida, a text is not closed or “self-sufficient”, so meanings of a text are not constant and changeless any more.The task of interpreting a text is far from a once-and-for-all one but a dynamic and continuous one because meanings of a text proliferate without limits. In the process of proliferation, the original meaning of the text fades away or disappears. The origin or the center of this text is in a state of uncertainty, so the ultimate meaning does not exist.A deconstructive reading of Gulliver’s Travels has revealed three indeterminacies in this text.Some words or sentences in this text demonstrated a critical attitude towards colonialism. Some of them made a direct attack on colonialism while the overtones of some revealed this attitude. There were also many examples in this text employed to straightforwardly castigate abominable evils of exploiting and enslaving colonized people and brutal, bloody and heinous colonial rule practiced by extremely vicious colonial rulers. In the meantime, this text was enveloped with colonialism on account of the existence of colonial discourses. Colonial discourses described Europeans as civilized, cultivated and superior, and non-Europeans as savage, ignorant and inferior.Therefore, this text shows an ambiguous and equivocal attitude towards colonialism.Science and technology on the basis of rationalism brought benefits such as the achievement of navigation and considerable profits from overseas trades. It was certain that a worshipful attitude towards rationalism was manifested from these descriptions.This text paid homage to rationalism by greatly praising the Houyhnhnms with a high degree of reason. Nevertheless, it is not hard to find in the text that the development ofscience and technology based on rationalism caused a variety of disasters such as the invention and application of destructive weapons, ruined and dilapidated cities and towns and untold misery. The development also incurred all sorts of impractical and ridiculous experiments. Hence, this text presents an uncertain and indefinite attitude towards rationalism.Some expressions that attacked women physically and psychologically without mercy appeared in this text, displaying the existence of misogyny. At the same time,the text appreciated and praised women, exhibiting the presence of philogyny. As a result, this text indicates an undetermined and undefined view of women.Based on the above analysis of three indeterminacies, it is concluded that Gulliver’s Travels does not have any specific final meaning, which may be attributed to the ambivalent and unstable nature of language.