LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Modest Proposal, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Today we regard “A Modest Proposal” as a seminal work of Western satire—satire being the use of humor or irony to reveal and criticize the evils of society. Though Swift wrote the tract in response to the specific social conditions afflicting his native Ireland, its bitter humor shocks and delights as much now as it did in 1729, when it circulated the streets of Dublin as an anonymous pamphlet. The power of Swift’s satire resides in the intensity of his verbal irony—that is, his ability to say one thing and mean precisely the opposite.
In large part, the humor of “A Modest Proposal” arises from the enormous gap between the cool, rational, self-righteous voice of the speaker and the obvious repulsiveness of his proposal: that the infant children of Ireland’s poor be raised as livestock, slaughtered, and sold as food to the wealthy, who will enjoy them as a tasty delicacy. No reader, no matter her personal values or political allegiances, will be able to take seriously the speaker’s proposal. Thus, the reader’s engagement with the text will consist in constantly looking beyond what is said in search of what is meant —or, to put it another way, looking for a sincere message hiding behind the obvious satire.
One way to understand the text’s irony—this discrepancy between saying and meaning—is to imagine the speaker as a fictional persona (call him “ the Proposer ”) who is totally distinct from Jonathan Swift, the author. The Proposer truly believes in the genius of his plan, and seems oblivious to the fact that it will strike any sane person as monstrous.
Yet, at a few moments in the text, it is possible to recognize Swift’s own voice and ideas sneaking around or through the Proposer’s ludicrous suggestions, advancing instead Swift’s own sincere convictions. This happens in the opening paragraphs of the essay, when Swift can be heard speaking alongside the Proposer—it is safe to say that both he and the Proposer share a mutual concern for the state of society in Ireland. This agreement makes the Proposer’s sudden endorsement of cannibalism all the more shocking and hilarious when it finally arrives. It is important to note that, in 1729, political pamphlets often made the rounds in Ireland, many of them offering earnest if somewhat misguided solutions to the social ills plaguing the country. Accordingly, the first readers of “A Modest Proposal” might not have caught on to the essay’s satirical intent until they reached the speaker’s startling claim that the flesh of an infant could make a fine “ragout,” a type of stew.
In what is perhaps the climax of the essay, Swift presents his own sincere (you might also say “actual”) thoughts on how best to resolve the situation in Ireland. But he does so backhandedly. Rather than state his proposal outright, he embeds it within the Proposer’s dismissal of any and all solutions that do not involve eating children. These alternatives, which the Proposer criticizes as impossible, will strike the reader as exceedingly reasonable, not to mention humane. The literary term for this rhetorical move—advancing an argument by pretending to refuse it—is apophasis, Greek for literally “speaking off.”
