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 hyperbole and irony to send a message. The point is to drive readers in the opposite direction of the narrator’s thesis and thus to a greater valuation of human life.

Swift’s narrator has so intellectualized the problem of poverty that he no longer sees the poor as wholly human. To him, they are mere economic figures whose suffering is less important than their deleterious effect on the economy. The narrator describes poor Irish women trailed by ragged children begging in the streets, starving people who sell themselves into indentured servitude in Barbados, and those who in desperation enlist as mercenaries in foreign armies; in each case, the humanity of these individuals eludes him. In fact, the narrator goes so far as to state that he is not worried at all about the many “aged, diseased, or maimed” Irish because they are dying off as fast as possible due to “cold and famine, and filth, and vermin.” He feels the same about the many starving young men who cannot find work, as they are dying off rapidly enough to suit him. Those who do find work die on the job from being too weak to labor, “happily” ridding the country and themselves of their unwanted presence. It is clear that this narrator has utterly lost his moral compass. Swift’s ironic stance with relation to the narrator brings readers to see more clearly the humanity of the poor.