Tale of a Tub is Swift’s wildest adventure in satirical humor.
The “A Tale of a Tub” sections describe the lives of three brothers: Peter, Martin, and Jack. Their father dies and they receive his will. He leaves them three coats, which the will stipulates that they should not alter or else they will ruin their futures. However, shoulder knots come into vogue, and the brothers, led by Peter, who represents the Catholic Church, begin to add to their coats.
The narrator moves on to define critics and critique. The true critic, whether ancient or modern, is able to locate flaws that nobody else can find and takes pleasure in it. Writers should view them like mirrors and use this reflection to fix their work.
Back in “A Tale of a Tub,” Peter is gaining more power over his brothers. Martin, who represents the Church of England, and Jack, who represents Puritanism, are both controlled by Peter. When they finally object, he kicks them out of the house, and they must go off on their own. This is symbolic of the Reformation. After this, there is a chapter that discusses the difference between ancient and modern philosophies as well as the art of writing a successful preface.
We then look back on the brothers, who are trying to fix their coats by taking the extra ribbons, buttons, and lace off, an act which causes damage. Martin does it carefully, but Jack is careless and gets holes in his coat. This represents the differences in their religious outlooks and the extent to which they are deconstructing the old Catholic teachings.
Swift then moves on to a digression praising digressions. In fact, he is using these tangents to highlight ideas that support his main argument about the ridiculousness of religious infighting and dogma. Indeed, the brothers descend into this very type of argument and are constantly at odds. Peter and Martin vie for the attention of various monarchs, while Jack becomes more extreme, developing an aversion to music. He also has his own set of followers who believe that they have an essence within themselves that must be released for the members to learn from each other. In the end, the author loses his train of thought. We can assume that the brothers .
Symbols
The Three Coats
The three brothers' coats are the central symbol of A Tale of a Tub. (Tubs, despite the title, figure only incidentally in the work.) Outwardly plain and simple, the coats are the brothers' sole inheritance from their father, who promises that they will last for a lifetime if cared for properly. In his will, he warns them against altering the coats in any way. These coats represent the practices of Christianity as originally revealed and commanded by God and as stipulated in the Bible (the father's will). Like the early Church written about in the New Testament, the brothers initially do a good job of sticking to the rules laid down by the will. It isn't long, however, before they are finding ways to excuse themselves from following the will too scrupulously when it conflicts with their immediate desires. This behavior is dramatized as a gradual altering of the coats in spite of the father's express wish to the contrary.
The Will of Father
The father's will represents the Bible, which Swift regards as Christianity's fundamental instruction manual.All three brothers start off faithfully following the will, but they are gradually corrupted by outside influences. They stray from its obvious intent and, increasingly, from its directly stated rules, becoming ridiculous and superficial in the process. This behavior is provoked by a desire to fit in with the rest of the world, as illustrated in the middle of Chapter 2. There, the brothers realize that they will have to get creative if they want to give the appearance of following their father's wishes while actually ignoring them. They use Latinate terms to add an aura of respectability to their dubious behavior: failing to find permission to change their coats ("in so many words"), they start looking ("in so many syllables").
Finally, they declare that their father's will allows them to add shoulder knots because it contains the letters S, H, O, U, L, D, E, and R.
Peter, the most scholarly of the brothers, undergoes great intellectual contortions to avoid the document's clear restrictions.In addition to (the so many words) episode above, he declares that certain premises must be added to the will or else absurda ("many absurdities will follow"). (He never specifies what those absurdities might be.) All of Peter's interpretive practices, along with the terms used to describe them, ultimately derive from a Catholic tradition .
The consequence of following this interpretive tradition is that both the Peter and the Martin and Jack grow further and further removed from the actual will. Here, Swift recalls and criticizes the Catholic Church's long history of forbidding vernacular Bibles, thereby preventing many adherents from reading Scripture for themselves. By the time the brothers go their separate ways .
Peter (i.e., the Catholic Church) is not cast in a good light in A Tale of a Tub. That's not to say, however, that Swift viewed all reforms as equally salutary. Martin (moderate Protestantism) and Jack (Dissent) successfully obtain their own copy of the will, which gives them the all-important ability to read it for themselves and judge how well they are following it. In itself, Swift implies, vernacular access to the Bible is a good thing, but a person can still go overboard in relying on Scripture. Swift's stance seems to be that the Bible is the ultimate authority on Church doctrine and discipline but that it is witless to see it as a substitute for all earthly wisdom.
Three Brothers
Three brothers is based on three branches of Christianity. Peter's oldest brother who represents the Roman Catholics Church. Martin middle brother who represents Anglican or Church of England. Jack the youngest brother represents Protestants Church or Dissenters.
Father
Father represents God in A Tale of Tub.
When the father was on death bed he gave one coat to three sons. And does not change anything in the coat. So Father represents God in A Tale of Tub.
Reference
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