The Meaning of the Palace on Fire Scene in Gulliver’s Travels and Its Adaptations in Selected English and Polish Abridged Versions of Jonathan Swift’s Novel

Abstract

The palace on fire scene in the first part of Gulliver’s Travels, when the main protagonist extinguishes the flames by urinating on them, has become the symbol of Swift’s personal criticism of authority and the institution of monarchy. For obvious reasons, in children’s version of the novel, the scene is remade and reinterpreted in a multitude of manners to remove the embarrassing physiological element that both young readers and their parents might find outrageous or simply offensive. The aim of the present article is to discuss the critical meaning of the scene in relation to Jonathan Swift’s political views and to demonstrate the great miscellany of variants of the scene in selected abridged versions of Gulliver’s Travels in Polish and English.