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True Intentions Behind Absurdity | | | Erik Rivas
Engl. 1302.02Prof. Maria Morales21 Sep. 2014 |

Jonathan Swift, Irish author and Dean of St. Patrick Cathedral in Dublin, applies satire in his arguments to get his message across. In one of his works, “A Modest Proposal,” he uses rhetorical devices such as irony, ethos, and pathos to try to open the minds of the Irish in order to bring awareness to the people who are starving and living in poverty. Throughout his argument, Swift uses irony. The title itself is ironic as it claims to be a modest proposal only to be the total opposite. He states that his solution about eating infants is absolute yet, gives various other examples that can be much more logically applied. Swift says that solutions such as “curing the expensiveness of pride, vanity idleness, and gaming in [the] women” (613) to prevent the overpopulation of babies born into poverty or that “teaching landlords to have at least one degree of mercy towards their tenants” (614) are not really the answers the people need. However, he uses irony to help them understand that in fact these are the solutions they need and yet they choose to let themselves to fail.
Swift also incorporates ethos into this work. He tries to minimize the cruelty into eating babies by mentioning different ways of eating them “whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled” (610), and giving them other purposes such as “gloves for the ladies, and summer boots for the fine gentleman” (611). The author belittles the damage and the moral issue in this idea to help the Irish see how something so brutal can be restated into something that can benefit the country. It causes an incentive towards cannibalism and by doing so, it grasps a better understanding of reality and the harsh life poor people endure. He does not whole-heartedly believe this is a solution but rather