Character guide

Lemuel Gulliver

major

Also known as Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, Mr. Gulliver, Captain Gulliver, Gulliver, Quinbus Flestrin

Gulliver trained in medicine and navigation, married Mary Burton, and went to sea only after his London practice failed because he refused to cheat his patients. He narrates his voyages with a surgeon's eye for measurement and a moralist's growing disgust at human pettiness. His compulsion to observe foreign manners and learn languages makes him the perfect instrument for Swift's satire, and his credulity is what lets each new society expose the last.

Glumdalclitch

supporting

In Brobdingnag, where Gulliver is a plaything passed between handlers, Glumdalclitch is the one pair of enormous hands that treats him with steady tenderness. She teaches him their language, sews him clothes, and carries him in a box against her chest, and her protective affection is the closest thing to safety he finds in a land of giants. Her grief when she loses him sharpens the cruelty of the world around her.

Reldresal

supporting

Reldresal moves easily between the emperor's chambers and Gulliver's chain, explaining Lilliput's absurd factional wars over egg-breaking and the rivalries that shape court life. He is genuinely fond of Gulliver, yet his loyalty to the state keeps him calculating, and his friendship comes with conditions. His private visit to reveal the articles of impeachment is the hinge on which Gulliver's Lilliputian fortunes turn.

Pedro de Mendez

supporting

Also known as Don Pedro, Don Pedro de Mendez

After Gulliver has come to loathe the very sight of his own species, Don Pedro is the first human to test that loathing with simple decency, offering clean clothes, a berth, and patient conversation. He neither mocks Gulliver's ravings nor indulges them, treating him as a man worth saving rather than a spectacle. His kindness is the quiet counterargument to everything Gulliver has concluded about humanity, and it is what makes the return home so painful.

Skyresh Bolgolam

supporting

Also known as Bolgolam

Bolgolam is a galbet, or high-admiral, whose professional vanity cannot survive the sight of a giant towing an enemy fleet with a hook. He joins Flimnap and the other ministers in drafting articles of impeachment, dressing petty resentment in the language of law and capital crime. His enmity shows how quickly a small court converts a useful stranger into a scapegoat, and his articles are the mechanism by which Lilliput turns on its own protector.

Flimnap

supporting

Flimnap governs the empire's money and its factions with equal dexterity, and he is rumored to have danced on a rope better than any minister in memory. His hostility to Gulliver is personal before it is political: he suspects the Man-Mountain of an affair with his wife and resents the cost of feeding him. As the treasurer who signs the impeachment, he embodies how private spite and public accounting become indistinguishable in a small state.

Captain William Robinson

minor

English captain who employs Gulliver on a voyage to the East Indies.

Mr. James Bates

minor

Also known as Mr. Bates, Bates

Gulliver's master and mentor in surgery in London.

James Welch

minor

Gulliver's cousin and executor of his estate.

Captain Pocock

minor

Captain of the ship on which Gulliver serves as surgeon.