Why does gulliver want to stay with the houyhnhnms

The Houyhnhnms are ice-cold reason; the Yahoos are fiery sensuality. In between these extremes is Gulliver. Previous The Brobdingnagians. Next The Yahoos. Removing book from your Reading List will also remove any bookmarked pages associated with this title.

Are you sure you want to remove bookConfirmation and any corresponding bookmarks? My Preferences My Reading List. Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift. Character Analysis The Houyhnhnms. They live on an unnamed island with the intelligent horse race called Houyhnhnms. Stay high. Gulliver goes on 4 voyages: 1. A voyage to Lilliput and Belfuscu 2. A voyage to Brobdingnag 3. A voyage to the country of the Houyhnhnms. Gulliver thought it better to leave and go back to his native country as he feared that the Lilliputians may persuade him back and punish him by blinding him and decreasing his diet slowly and steadily.

He also didn't want to stay in Blefuscu as he didn't trust the monarchs, polities and policies anymore. In a conversation with the Dapple-Gray about the detestable Yahoos, Gulliver suggests that the Houyhnhnms exterminate the Yahoos through the benevolent use of castration. The Dapple-Gray then brought the idea before the Grand Assembly. Yes, the Dapple-Gray did suggest castration, but it was originally Gulliver's idea from his experience with horses in England and it was suggested as a means for annihilating the Yahoos.

They would castrate the Yahoos and let them slowly die out, thus exterminating them. Log in. Gulliver's Travels. Study now. See Answer. Best Answer. Study guides. Sherlock Holmes 25 cards. Who were the leaders of the transcendentalist movement in America. Who were the leaders of the enlightenment in America. What did gulliver do that made the people of Blefuscu surrender. Who was beheaded in after a bitter dispute with the Puritans.

Sherlock Holmes 30 cards. Sherlock Holmes 31 cards. Q: Why does gulliver want to stay with the Houyhnhnms? So, let's get a little more specific about the Houyhnhnms. We love them because, well, they're horses — who doesn't like talking horses? But Gulliver kind of worships them, and it's worth talking about why. Here are some of the characteristics Gulliver singles out for comment: there are no words in Houyhnhnm language for any of the bad things we humans do, including lying, power, greed, or jealousy.

In fact, Gulliver has a lot of trouble explaining human nature to his best buddy, the Master Horse, because he keeps having to talk around things that the Master Horse has no concept of. The best example of this kind of talking around that Gulliver has to do is "the thing which is not" 4.

The Houyhnhnms don't need laws or a special class of lawyers because they are completely governed by reason. Breaking laws is not rational, so they don't need to spell out their codes of behavior. This is like a more perfect version of the less-than-twenty-words Brobdingnagian rule about law — the Houyhnhnms don't need to limit the length of their laws because they don't even need laws. They all agree about the rightness of what to do.

The fact that all the Houyhnhnms agree about law points to something else Gulliver loves about them: they don't understand opinions or factions. To have an opinion about something, you have to speculate about something you can't know for sure. The Houyhnhnms accept hard facts; anything outside of fact, you can't argue about, because by definition you can't know what the correct answer is. It makes no sense to argue about something you can never answer correctly.

This is why the Houyhnhnms have no law. As you may have guessed from the fact that the Houyhnhnms don't have arguments or differences of opinion, they are equally friendly with all members of their tribe. They value "friendship and benevolence" 4.

In fact, this friendship thing is so important to Houyhnhnms that they treat all of their children as their own, and will educate all the kids in the same way. This total lack of preference for one Houyhnhnm over another means that they always, always arrange marriages for their children.

There's no such thing as a love match. Families will get together and decide: oh, your daughter is smart? My son is attractive. Let's breed them together to get smart, attractive children. And Houyhnhnm couples never cheat on each other because it makes no sense — they're in this relationship for the kids, not for love or sex or anything. And it gets even more technical: Houyhnhnm couples are limited to one boy and one girl foal a baby horse. If one couple has two girls and another couples has two boys, they trade one of their kids.

If a couple is unfortunate enough to lose a child to an accident, they can have one more child to supply the loss. This type of rigidity in family arrangements is hugely different from what we've seen in, say, Laputa, where the wives are constantly on the lookout for other men.