Literary Analysis Essay on "A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift

Introduction

A Modest Proposal For keeping the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for making them Beneficial to the Public, usually alluded to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian humorous exposition composed and distributed by Jonathan Swift in 1729. The exposition recommends that the devastated Irish may facilitate their financial inconveniences by selling their kids as sustenance for rich, respectable men and women. This ironical exaggeration ridiculed cutthroat frames of mind towards poor people, just as British arrangement toward the Irish when all is said and done. In English composition, the expression "a modest proposal" is currently habitually a reference to this style of straight-confronted parody. This paper will discuss ways in which John Swift "A Modest Proposal" is satirical, the narrator's position on the solution to the problem of poverty. Further, the paper will discuss how the use of satire enhance or hurt the narrator's argument and if the narrator's stated goal convey the literal meaning of this argument, or does the narrator have another purpose in mind.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Order now

John Swift uses satire in addressing his message. The narrator starts by disapproving the sad destiny of the impoverished Irish that has used all their time trying to provide for their large families. Swift uses satire to provide a solution to the poverty that the large families have been forced to live in because of feeding many mouths. As a solution, Swift suggests that the poor Irish families should make their children fat and then sell them to the rich English land proprietors (Beaumont, 2017).

Swift humorously makes his argument that the fattened up children can be sold in the meat market from a tender age as early as one attains the age of one (Beaumont, 2017). To back up his argument, Swift bases his argument that by selling the fattened up children makes the low-income families to raise money which they need, and at the same time easing the expense of nurturing so many children. With a hundred thousand Irish kids out of the populace being put aside for supper, his solution, Swift reasons, will likewise resolve the issues of overpopulation and joblessness in Ireland, giving the Irish economy a genuinely necessary boost, while making it simpler for England to manage its uncontrollable Irish subjects (Beaumont, 2017).

Furthermore, Swift does not leave it at that point. Beaumont (2017) state that Swift goes further by providing the statistical support and offering the particular data to be used for his proposal regarding the weight, price, and several children to sell, and the pattern of eating of the consumers. Moreover, Swift goes ahead in giving suggestions of the recipes for the preparation of the new delicious meat in town basing his reasoning that cooking done with innovative mind makes a more delicious meal. He goes ahead and reasons that the new meat will give and expansion and culinary experience of the rich people leading to a population that is healthy and happy (Beaumont, 2017).

At the end of his works, Beaumont (2017) states that Swift satirically argues that the exercise of selling and eating of the fattened-up children will contribute positively to the Irish family positively in that the husbands will show more respect to their wives, and the value in which the parents will have towards their children will also increase in ways that are not yet known. His suggestion, he contends, will, whenever effected, achieve more to explain Ireland's complex social, political as well as financial concerns than of any kind another measure that has yet been projected. My perspective of swift suggestion is that it is very weird. Even though he is trying to make his work satirical, this is a practice that can never be implemented. It is against human rights and assuming that the proposal is implemented, and then human trafficking may be on the rise. However, it is very clear that Swift is using humor in criticizing the ideologies of people. Swift is not for the idea of selling children as meat, but he is making use of the outrageous idea in delivering a message.

The narrator's solution to poverty is about selling children (Simpson & Bousfield, 2017). Through the author, Swift, the narrators insists that he isn't reluctant to hear elective recommendations, in the event that they are "similarly honest, shabby, simple, and viable." They ought to likewise make sure to consider the two dire issues that his own proposition addresses so completely. To begin with, it must show how 100,000 "futile Mouths and Backs" are to get fed and dressed (Simpson & Bousfield, 2017). What is more, second, it must address the outrageous neediness of most by far of the Irish populace, whose hopelessness is great to the point that they would "think it an extraordinary Happiness to have been sold for Food at a Year old." Swift fortifies that he has just the "publick Good" at the top of the priority list with this proposition for "propelling our Trade, accommodating Infants, assuaging the Poor, and giving some Pleasure to the Rich." He is himself totally impartial, having no youngsters by which he get money, since the youngest is as of now nine-years of age (Simpson & Bousfield, 2017).

The author record of his long and depleting long stretches of grappling with Ireland's issues may be taken as Swift's own. His inventory of as far as anyone knows improbable elective arrangements denote a defining moment in the flyer and a break in the parody. The thoughts the proposer rejects speak to measures that Swift himself had spent a lot of vitality supporting, to exasperatingly little impact. They are a lot of ventures by which the Irish may would like to break out of their cycle of exploitation without the requirement for England's participation. Swift's is a platform of civic-minded, energetic, and principled conduct intended to impact change from within. The gathering of people is stood up to with the way that there are genuine and practicable answers for Ireland's national unsettling, in which they themselves, in their avarice and extravagance, are blamable.

References

Beaumont, C. A. (2017). Swift's Rhetoric in "A Modest Proposal." In Landmark Essays on Rhetoric and Literature(pp. 167-188). Routledge.

Simpson, P., & Bousfield, D. (2017). Humor and stylistics. In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor (pp. 158-173). Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group New York, London.