this demonstrates that Catholics owned nothing. In“ A Modest Proposal”, Swift powerfully uses sarcasm, insincerity, and rhetorical exaggeration to expose his anger toward politicians and general citizens of poor Ireland in the end of the seventeenth century. Though, there are three factors that make Swift’s argument not serious: the tone of the author, his religious background, and outrageousness of the proposal.
Ireland. Jonathan Swift, an Anglo-Irish novelist, did not like how his countrymen, the English, were neglecting the famine occurring in Ireland. To express his frustration, he wrote a satirical essay proposing a solution, called “A Modest Proposal”. In “A Modest Proposal”, Swift uses sarcasm, satire, and symbolism to display the poor conditions of Ireland, and to express his annoyance with his own countrymen and society as a whole in seventeenth century Ireland. Swift’s tone throughout the essay is
problems are not confronted, they cannot be solved. In their respective essays, Jonathan Swift and William F. Buckley, Jr. discuss the idea that a society that is apathetic toward its problems cannot advance. In the satire "A Modest Proposal," Swift mockingly suggests a "modest" solution to improve the economy and address starvation in Ireland in 1729 because at the time, the government had not done anything to solve the dilemma. He proposed that the Irish citizens start selling and eating their own