1. What to make of his starkly impersonal tone?
2. What are the effects of the factual, reportorial style of the novel?
3. What is in the distance between the gullible Gulliver and the skeptical reader?
4. What is Swift being satirical of?
5. What's the historical background when Swift wrote the book?
6. What does the difference in physical size imply?
7. How does Swift satirize humanity's pretensions to power and significance?
8. What does Swift imply by recasting European history as a series of brutal wars over meaningless and arbitrary disagreements?
9. Why does Swift think that these religious, political, national identity are trivial and irrelevant?
10. How does Swift make fun of language itself?
11. What is a persistent motif in the novel?
12. What is Swift's point in the ladies' flaws being literally magnified?
13. Hos is the floating island an allegorical image?
14. How are the nobility and scientific thinkers depicted?
15. In what way does the book depict a totalitarian world?
16. What's Swift view on science?
17. In what way Swift was an anarchist?
18. How is Swift's view on humanity reactionary?
19. What is the relationship between agreement with a writer's opinions, and enjoyment of his work?
20. Is the literary quality of a book separable from its subject-matter?
21. Why does Swift refuse to see anything in human life except dirt, folly, and wickedness?
22. How are pleasure and disgust linked together?
23. "If horror and pain must always be with us, how can life be significantly improved?" Why is this a wrong attitude?
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