Literary Analysis of a Modest Proposal

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A Modest Proposal by Jonathon Swift is a satirical essay written in 1729. It was written in protest of the English treatment of the Catholic people of Ireland. Swift explains and attacks the cruel and unjust oppression of Ireland by the much more powerful, England. The Catholic people had many restrictions put on them. A few of these restrictions are as follows: the Catholics were not allowed to vote, they couldn’t marry a Protestant, they couldn’t attend Trinity College, they weren’t able to obtain orphans, they couldn’t be in the military or even own firearms and they weren’t able to buy land unless they had less than a thirty year lease. Overall, the Irish people were struggling politically, economically, agriculturally, socially and religiously. The Irish people struggled politically because they had no power. A trade deficit caused them to struggle economically. According to Lein, Swift and his friends believed that the English were planning to throw Ireland into even more savage conditions. Ireland’s exceptional state of poverty at the time was the most prominent of all the issues and it gave Swift the motivation to take on the difficult tasks of fixing Ireland (Lein 432). The purpose of A Modest Proposal was to bring about change to fix these problems. Nobody wanted to listen to Swift’s real and logical solutions because everyone was too busy hoping for a quick and easy solution. Swift, aggravated that no one took his ideas into consideration, created a narrator that promises to have the perfect solution to all Irelands problems. The narrator is a concerned Irishman who is very intelligent, sound and serious, yet he appears to be completely immoral for calmly proposing a solution of eating babies. Swift sabotages the narrator in an attempt to try and wake the people of Ireland up and help them to see their own depravity. Swift is able to sabotage the
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