Critical Analysis Of A Modest Proposal By Jonathan Swift

A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift is a fake idea come up to show how bad some of the people 's lives were and were becoming in Ireland at the time. People were starving, living in slums and dying at very young ages. Jonathan Swift was a middle-class man with the intentions to help these poor, dying people but only to find that these people just rejected his ideas and spat in his face. After multiple failed tries to get the people of Ireland to realize their state of helplessness, Swift chooses a slightly different approach. In this new attempt, Swift builds an absurd proposal which to get these poor and helpless people to realize their situation and take control of their lives. While relying primarily on satire and his unique writing style, …show more content…
He then goes on to say instead of working and making a living like they should, these mothers are "forced to employ all their time in Stroling, to beg Sustenance for their helpless Infants" who then just grow up to become "Thieves". So instead of working and feeding their children like most parents they have to stroll the streets and beg for money. The reader then is thinking of ways to help them or make their lives better and attempt to do the exact procedure Swift tried in the …show more content…
The tone throughout the essay shifts multiple times from serious to sarcastic. Swift depends on a disgustingly funny idea in order to get his audience to notice and finally take action. This concept was to consume children from the poor, for food in order to feed the healthy and get rid of the kids who would just grow up and die anyway. He says that eating children will overall help and benefit Ireland 's economics. He uses six central points in order to structure his overall argument. Swifts points he makes in his arguments are surprisingly well thought out and actually clever, he says "the poorer Tenants will have something valuable of their own" meaning that making it alright to eat children makes them more valuable meaning the poor people now have close to property that they could sell, barter, or even eat. These points range from parents having less maintenance without children to improving marriage. This idea was almost a last resort in order to get these people to realize their position. For example, Swift uses words to describe children like “delicious”, “nourishing” and a “wholesome food” in order to make the children seem like they are less than human but then also turning it around to show that he was not serious. When Swift uses these words he uses them in a way to be