After watching the recent cinematic version of Gulliver’s Travels with my thirteen-year-old son, I asked him what he thought the moral of the story was. He replied, “Don’t lie.” That’s not a bad answer: both the original book and the new adaptation, starring Jack Black as a modern-day Gulliver, have at their core the issues of truth-telling and lying, authenticity and hypocrisy, and illusion and reality. But while the new film shows Gulliver on a clear journey from self-deception to straightforwardly depicted authenticity, in his original version, Jonathan Swift presents a much more complex understanding of how lying and honesty fit into human nature.
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