In "A Modest Proposal," Swift creates a completely clueless narrator who has no idea how his words sound to others. This first-person speaker tells us what he thinks in his own words, completely unmediated. The disconnect between how persuasive and reasonable he thinks he is being and the horror of what he is proposing creates the dark comedy of the essay.

Much of the effect of the essay, which is meant to elicit a recoiling rejection of the speaker's ideas while at the same time highlighting the real issues faced by the Irish poor, comes from the imagery the narrator uses. A summary of his thoughts told by a neutral third party would not have the same effect as such lines as:

I rather recommend buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs.

Swift is satirizing the bean counters of his generation who put financial considerations ahead of anything else when trying to solve such problems as poverty, and who often use facts and statistics to make cruelty seem reasonable. By creating a tone-deaf narrator who is so fixated on economics that he loses sight of the fact that he is talking about human beings, Swift highlights the immorality of dealing with people as if they are no more than objects or animals. Ultimately, Swift is showing the absurdity and cruelty of reducing people to economic equations, as the well-to-do in England were doing with the poor of Ireland.