Perusing Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, I was thinking about the various ways in which he utilizes satire to discuss political flaws without being attacked. I genuinely laugh out loud thinking about the kind of content that Swift could have produced during this election cycle and over the past year especially. Swift's style is so unique because everything he produces is such a cosmic joke that you don't understand unless you first can understand that it's a joke. If you take him too seriously, everything makes sense in the way that fictional things make sense. But, if you know it's a joke, it makes sense on such an all-encompassing level. I would love it if he could somehow live again for just enough time to be caught up to speed on everything and write something roasting everything happening today. It would truly make 2020 more bearable.
Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" is secretly about Cotton-Eyed Joe. We often talk about how poems resemble songs, so why can't the plots of short stories do the same? In the case of "Bartleby", I think that he as a person can easily be likened to our dear old pal CE Joe. We don't know where he came from, we don't know where he went (in the biblical sense). He has an air of mystery about him. He messes with the narrator's personal life. I know that this is silly, but I think it's fun to relate things that you don't necessarily enjoy to things that you do. If anyone can think of other parallels between the two, please feel free to comment them below.
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