Themes: The Humanity of the Poor

In Swift’s satirical 1729 essay A Modest Proposal, the narrator is a conceited and clueless economist who proposes to solve Ireland’s famine by the consumption of infants. Swift’s reprehensible narrator serves a key rhetorical purpose. The narrator’s eponymous “modest proposal”—solving poverty through cannibalism—is meant to appall readers. In creating this narrator and this proposal, Swift is using hyperboleand irony to send a...

Themes: The Narrowness of Reason

Swift’s narrator focuses minutely on facts and figures about the poor. There is a careful reasoning behind the narrator’s opinions, but his reasoning—unguided by ethics—leads to vile conclusions. For example, he calculates the cost of fattening up and raising a poor infant until the age of one, when it can be sold to be prepared as a delicacy to be served at rich people’s tables. He carefully calculates the profit to be expected but entirely...

Themes: Suffering and Greed

Swift traces the link between suffering and greed in this essay. He achieves this through an ironic framing of his clueless narrator, who is indifferent to the suffering of the poor. To him, they are merely a problem for the well-to-do. The Irish poor are starving, unemployed, and desperate, with almost no hope of a better situation. The narrator, for whom morals are subordinate to economic calculations, highlights the plight of the poor,...

Themes: Solutions to Poverty

One of Swift’s central ideas in this essay is that there are real solutions to the problems of poverty. He did not write this essay for his own amusement or because he agreed that it was a good idea to sell, kill, and eat human infants. A clergyman who felt anger and anguish over the plight of the poor, Swift composed the essay out of a deep frustration with the lack of response from people with power to what he perceived as a humanitarian crisis...

Themes: Satire

Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" is a masterful example of satire, using irony, exaggeration, and humor to critique English exploitation of Ireland. Swift adopts the persona of a rational scientist to propose the absurd idea of selling Irish children as food, mocking the dehumanizing attitudes of English Protestants towards Irish Catholics. Through vivid imagery and ironic language, Swift highlights the dire conditions of the Irish poor and...

Themes: Social Critique

Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" is a powerful social critique that uses satire to address the severe economic and social issues in 18th-century Ireland. Through exaggerated solutions and a seemingly rational narrator, Swift highlights the indifference of the ruling classes towards the plight of the poor. His proposal to solve poverty by eating children is a shocking metaphor for the exploitation and dehumanization faced by the Irish under...