Satire In Johnathan Swift's A Modest Proposal

Would people, as parents, wait 9 months for a child just to eat them, a year later? Johnathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal uses satire text to give a better understanding of the underlying causes of poverty in Ireland, in 1729. At the time, he gives a solution and expresses that to help poverty, we should fatten up the newborns and when they turn the age of one sell them to the landlords for a nice meal. In Swift’s pamphlet, the author effectively uses ethos, logos, and satire to convince the audience of what he is proposing, which is how to end poverty by eating the young children.

Furthermore, in Swift’s writing, he uses logos which is the principle of divine reason and judgment. The people that were not as wealthy would run out of money and could not pay their landlords. All the people's crops and livestock would have already been acquired, but if they could use their children as a way to make a deal than they could pay the rent on their homes. “The poorer

Emotion is what majorly affects peoples decision making, all the time they always have feelings about things that affect the decision. Using pathos Swift tries to make the audience emotionally invested and wants them to feel a certain way about something. “There is likewise another great advantage in my scheme, that it will prevent those voluntary abortions, that horrid practice of women murdering their bastard children, alas, too frequent among us, sacrificing the poor innocent babes, I doubt more to avoid the expense than the shame, which would move tears and pity in the most savage and inhuman breast” (357). In this Swift really has people thinking, or at least me on how to fix this problem or how we can help in any way. This is the emotional part that gets people thinking and gets them on board with what he is trying to get