Gulliver’s Travels is not structured like a traditional novel. It is broken down into four voyages during which Lemuel Gulliver’s vessel is cast ashore in many strange lands. Each voyage is a separate tale placed within an overall story. In order to assess the general theme of the work, each voyage containing numerous descriptions and anecdotes should be considered individually. The characters presented possess the attitudes and qualities of Europeans of the time from the author’s perspective.

Voyage 1: Lilliput

The Emperor of Lilliput is equally capable of kindness and cruelty. He can use his status of royalty to spread his beneficence or usurp dictatorial power:

It seems, that upon the first moment I was discovered sleeping on the ground, after my landing, the emperor had early notice of it by an express; and determined in council, that I should be tied in the manner I have related, (which was done in the night while I slept;) that plenty of meat and drink should be sent to me, and a machine prepared to carry me to the capital city.

Voyage 2: Brobdingnag

The King of Brobdingnag is a kind ruler endowed with common sense and rationality, but his common sense makes it difficult to govern. He is terrified by the complexities of politics. This fear leads him to make some poor decisions based on ignorance:

As for yourself, continued the king, who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

Voyage 3: LAPUTA, BALNIBARBI, LUGGNAGG, GLUBBDUBDRIB, AND JAPAN

The King of Laputa does not rule with a sense of practicality. He is a ruthless dictator:

If any town should engage in rebellion or mutiny . . . the king has two methods of reducing them to obedience . . . he can deprive them of the benefit of the sun and the rain, and consequently afflict the inhabitants with dearth and diseases: and if the crime deserve it, they are at the same time pelted from above with great stones . . . But if they still continue obstinate, or offer to raise insurrections, he proceeds to the last remedy, by letting the island drop directly upon their heads . . .

Voyage 4: THE COUNTRY OF THE HOUYHNHNMS

Gray Horse is the kind, benevolent, and rational master of the protagonist. He remains unemotional throughout his dealings with Gulliver:

My master heard me with great appearances of uneasiness in his countenance; because doubting, or not believing, are so little known in this country, that the inhabitants cannot tell how to behave themselves under such circumstances. And I remember, in frequent discourses with my master concerning the nature of manhood in other parts of the world, having occasion to talk of lying and false representation, it was with much difficulty that he comprehended what I meant, although he had otherwise a most acute judgment.

The above characters represent just a few of the inhabitants of the lands to which Gulliver travels. Taken as a whole, the reader can identify the general themes that Swift communicates through this story. He concludes that European values are corrupt. Gulliver begins his journey believing people to be good-natured. After the voyages, he develops the same dissatisfaction with humankind shared by Swift. Gulliver, like the author, sees civilization itself as depraved. The general theme of the book is that human beings are irrational and unethical, and life itself should be viewed through a pessimistic prism.

There are many many themes in Gulliver's Travels, but I would argue that the most important is the constant battle between the individual and society. This has been a perennial theme in political discourse ever since the explicit philosophical articulation of the self was first made in 17th century Europe. Once it was established that individuals were endowed with certain rights and liberties that ought to be protected from society, it became necessary to define the degree to which individuals needed to conform to the existing social rules and customs.

In all the societies he visits, Gulliver is very much an outsider; he's about as individual as they come. Wherever he winds up, Gulliver finds himself forced to conform to a bewildering array of often absurd and pointless customs that he never quite understands. Gulliver's alienation from the societies he encounters highlights the way in which social customs can often be used to stifle individuality, blurring the distinction between the individual and the society in which he or she lives. As a rather singular individual himself, Swift is intensely suspicious of any kind of collective endeavor, as we see in his mordant commentary on the Lilliputians' practice of communal child-rearing. This is supposed to be a more civilized way of raising children, but in actual fact it simply means that children grow up without any sense of individuality, the true hallmark of a human being.

A theme of Gulliver's Travels is that your circumstances and situation shape the way you view life, shaping your reality. As Gulliver travels he is surrounded by characters who are very different than he. He is a giant in the land of the Lilliputians and a little person in the land of the Brobdingnag. He is treated differently and reacts differently in each situation, including how he uses his might or intellect. On the other hand, the characters in the lands he visits use their might and intellect to work against Gulliver, and each other.

In each of the lands that Gulliver visits, the sociology of the societies is distinct when it comes to family, child rearing, identity, and how they respond to conflict, and vice versa how Gulliver responds to them. Each of them is affected by the reality of the expectations set by their upbringing and social norms.

That answer is available to you right here on eNotes - see the link below. This work is a political satire disguised as a travel tale. As  Lemuel Gulliver travels all over the world, he learns lessons about the nature of man, the ineffectiveness of government, hypocrisy -- all sorts of issues regarding the human condition. The themes include human nature, corruption, politics, oppression, cultural conflicts, the downsides of science and the folly of blindly following traditions. Its themes are very ambitious.

A great deal of the political satire is contemporary to Swift's day. The Lilliputian emperor, for example, is a terrible ruler - petty, self-serving, pompous and easily manipulated by his advisors. He is said to represent King George I. Other things that are satirized are contemporary to Swift's day (the ideas of the Enlightenment, the idea of British superiority, religious traditions and practices of the day, etc.) but also have timeless applications.

Several themes of Gulliver's Travels are as follows:

Appearances can be deceiving: Gulliver, like most people, tends to judge by appearances. For example, he first believes the tiny, doll-like Lilliputians must be morally good people because they are outwardly attractive, only to find they are vicious and petty.

There are other points of view, and your own culture may not be superior: Gulliver is always running up against societies that think their own cultures are superior to the rest of the world. For example, the Houyhnhnm initially find it difficult to comprehend that, in England, humans own horses since they consider horses superior. This is ironic since the Houyhnhnm own Yahoos, but this shows that even a rational society has trouble looking at life from a different point of view.

Don't believe everything you hear (don't be gullible): Gulliver's name derives from the word gullible, and much of the humor comes in the novel from this character trait. Gulliver believes and transmits every absurdity he witnesses with wide-eyed innocence. We laugh, but Swift's underlying message is serious: use your own reason and moral values to evaluate whether customs, practices, and ideas that are praised are actually praiseworthy.

Humans are irrational and cruel: Related to the above theme, the book shows that humans are often irrational and cruel. For example, the Lilliputians, by humane and rational standards, should be grateful to Gulliver for putting out the palace fire and saving lives. Instead, they are furious and want to punish him because he dishonored them by doing it through peeing on the palace.

In the 18th century, the full-length fiction novel was still an emerging art form. However, Gulliver's Travels does share some themes with other prominent works of that era, particularly the novel Robinson Crusoe. Swift borrowed the themes of a civilized person marooned on an island, as well as that person's innate lust for adventure, and gave the work his own unique twist; Crusoe's themes of self-reliance and religion became themes of human folly, with a protagonist who spends all of his time being captured by various strange cultures. While Gulliver is brave enough, he is unable to directly affect his own fate, instead constantly reacting to events around him. Where other works have the superior protagonist reshaping the strange into the familiar, Gulliver finds himself adopting other cultures as a matter of course. Another theme is of unexplored places in the world; where Crusoe had cannibals, Gulliver has tiny people, huge people, and flying islands. This focus on the fantastic allowed Swift to satirize elements of British society in an easily-accessible manner.

Swift's own description of the novel was:

Upon that great foundation of Misanthropy is the whole building of my Travels erected; And I will never have peace of mind until honest men are of my opinion.

Satire is not a theme as much as it is a style of writing. Gulliver's Travels is, indeed, a masterwork of satire but the principle theme of Gulliver's Travels, one that runs through each section of the book, is misanthropy.

In the tale, Lemuel Gulliver, a middle-aged English doctor on a Royal Navy ship that washes up on the shores of various fictional countries. The first voyage in Lilliput, where the principle dispute is between the little-enders and big-enders (whether one should break an egg on the small side or the big) is intended to poke fun at the religious and political debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries where the contentious issues were often as ridiculous as those in Lilliput. In the second voyage, the history and politics of England are held up for ridicule. The third voyage satirizes philosophers and scientists who waste their time on absurd projects such as extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, turning ice into gunpowder and making cloth from cobweb. In the final voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms, we are shown that the horses are humane, learned and gentle creatures whereas human-like creatures, called Yahoos, are coarse and stupid. The fourth voyage brings out, most clearly, Swift's misanthropy.

You'll find a discussion of the themes in this wonderful book in the section of the eNotes study guide focusing on the themes (http://www.enotes.com/gullivers-travels/themes ). However, let us review some of them here. Start with your point about satire. Because this is a sweeping satire, many of the other themes emerge as subjects of satire. For example, Gulliver visits several different lands and all of them have rulers. Government and social organization are therefore themes…which he treats with satire. Science is another theme—what it can do, what it can't do, etc. Even the structure of the narrative is like a traveler's account, which were part of the emerging sciences of the day. At the bottom, though, is the theme of what it means to be a person and how people should live.