Gulliver should have known that his attempt to "sally to the extreme" of Houyhnhnm raionality was dangerous to his sanity. From the heights of the imagination to which he has travelled in his attempt to achieve Houyhnhmn rationality, Gulliver drops to...
Gulliver should have known that his attempt to "sally to the extreme" of Houyhnhnm raionality was dangerous to his sanity. From the heights of the imagination to which he has travelled in his attempt to achieve Houyhnhmn rationality, Gulliver drops to the depth of despair and madness, and his misery and delusion foretell Swift's own. By flirting with the limits of the imagination, Swift courted the demon he denied. And if Swift's last words actually were "I am what I am," then he spoke as a man seeing himself at last not in a mirror(our final view of Gulliver) but from the inside out-unpleasant perhaps, but without reflection and therefore without color.