Is Lemuel Gulliver Mad ?

In a very broad sense, Gulliver’s Travels bears a close resemblance to Plato’s allegory of the cave. Lemuel Gulliver is the man who somehow managed to free himself from the shackles. He steps out of the cave and, having seen the sun, he cannot pretend that looking at shadows on the wall is the only possible way of life. What happens at the end of Gulliver’s Travels is just what Plato says will happen to the man who returns into the cave to free the others. He is treated as insane because the others are not able to understand what he now knows, or thinks he knows.
At the end of Gulliver’s Travels the main character, once a typical representative of his culture, has gone through a transformation which leads him to reject that culture in a way that his contemporaries fail to understand. They consider his unaccountable behaviour highly suggestive of mental derangement. From the point of view of his contemporaries, Gulliver really shows some clear signs of melancholia, in the 18th ...