Certainly you are not alone in being shocked and disgusted by Swift’s proposal! He states a plethora of atrocities such as how to cook children – babies! - (p. 803) and how they are best prepared. However, the reaction this evokes is exactly what Swift wants. He wanted to show his audience the desperation of the situation that Ireland, his home country, was put through.
Swift introduces his essay emotionally and with actual logic to deceive the reader into thinking the essay will provide emotional analysis on how to fix the problems of Ireland. But as the essay progresses, Swift’s emotion fades and his logic becomes construed. He presents the idea of eating children to relieve the poor mothers of their debts and to give the wealthy a nice meal. Even though Swift seems to be a mad and deranged cannibal, he actually made a strong point by suggesting the gormandizing of children. By bringing forth this absurd point, Swift reveals the absurd and unfair treatment of the people of Ireland.
He was mocking how many illogical and impractical plans were proposed by the Irish government. They were attempting to pass these plans in order to improve the welfare of the people. Swift proposed this illogical plan of raising babies and eating them in order to relieve the economic trouble of the country. Swift uses satire in an almost practical way by supporting his plan with points that make it seem logical and beneficial to the country when in reality it would completely destroy the country. Swift uses satire to point out a problem and then assert an insane and illogical fix in order to cure it.
All stories are created in order to in someway draw a reader in and to create some type of emotions. Jonathan Swift choose to use sarcasm and biting wit and later shock value as his writing style in order to get people thinking about some extremely serious subject matter. Jonathan Swift has written many pieces of litature, he is mainly known for his writing of Gulliver’s Travels but his rise to fame was his essay of A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick. Swift is grabbing his readers’ attention through a well used means of communication, a political pamphlet. Through a well educated and in a voice of a proper
The author uses satire to accomplish his objective because it is the most effective way to awake the people of Ireland into seeing their own corruption. He uses rhetorical strategies such as sarcasm, juxtaposition, and paradox to compile his proposal. The sarcasm mentioned in the first paragraph, “It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors, crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags and importuning every passenger for an alms.” The sarcasm in this speech is that it’s not obvious whether it is a melancholy for him to see homeless people every day or for the beggar’s way of life. Someone would think that he really sympathizes with the beggars and their way of life almost as if he too was a beggar. However as one later finds out it is not the way he makes it appear because he is nowhere near a beggars state or class and is being only sarcastic showing how the lower class are a nuisance to the select few in society.
This image will play a role in guiding the reader’s emotion throughout the essay. Next, the author’s persona provides his “solution” to this national dilemma. The modest proposal, which ironically is not modest at all, is to butcher the infants of the poor and serve them as a new delicacy for the wealthy. As a side note, Swift includes that this meat is, “very proper for landlords, who…have already devoured most of the parents” (676). Here, Swift directly links his
Not me I dotnt nkweoSacraments Period G 7 May 2012 An Immodest Proposal In Jonathon Swift’s A Modest Proposal, Swift’s recommendation for trying to help Ireland is anything but modest. Although it is a very interesting read, and Swift does bring up some good points as to why his plan should be put into effect, the sheer idea of what he is considering a “modest” proposal is ridiculous and disturbing. It is understood that A Modest Proposal is a satirical scenario in which Swift feels can benefit Ireland in multiple ways, but the fact that people would try to compare the essay to a serious ethical dilemma of today is almost as absurd as Swift’s idea itself. The essay begins with the author explaining the normality of seeing poor women with multiple children begging for money. He discusses how much of an annoyance this is, justifying that the children will grow up to be thieves or leave their native country anyway.
Swift draws on the long-standing perception among the English and the Anglo-Irish ruling classes of the Irish as a barbaric people. Swift neither confirms nor negates this assumption altogether. He indicts the Irish Catholics for the extent to which they dehumanize themselves through their baseness and lack of self-respect. He also, however, admonishes those who would accuse the poor for their inhumane lack of compassion. And, he critiques the barbarism of a mode of social thought that takes economic
The next technique that I will be showing is repetition. Repetition is when something is repeated to give a much stronger affect, throughout this poem Wilfred Owen repeats that he hates the war due to the weather and the lies they were fed about war. I am going to talk about is “but nothing happens” in this poem this quote comes in four times in stanzas one, three, four and eight. The hatred in this quote is that they are waiting for the government to come and collect them, they are waiting for the bad weather to end but most of all
Owen sympathizes with the vain young men who have no idea of the horrors of war, who are 'seduced' by others (Jessie Pope) and the recruiting posters. The detail in Owen's poetry puts forward his scenes horrifically and memorably. His poems are suffused with the horror of battle. Many of Owen's poems bring across disturbing themes and images, which stay in the mind long after readers have read them. His aim is not poetry, but to describe the full horrors of war.