Introduction
In this passage, Robinson Crusoe compares life on the island with being in prison. These similarities can be traced when he says that he wants to wring his hands and cry like a child: “I was a prisoner, locked in the eternal bolts of the ocean, in an uninhabited desert, without redemption”(Defoe 89). At first glance, one may not understand why an island in the Pacific Ocean is compared to four walls. On the island a person is free, nothing holds him and no one watches over him, as in prison.
However, when a person gets to the island due to circumstances and cannot get out of there for more than one year, it is comparable to a prison in which fate is the warden. Moreover, the author uses comparisons and enumerations in this passage. For example, “the greatest composures of my mind, this would break out upon me like a storm”, and ” my very heart would die within me, to think of the woods, the mountains, the deserts ” (Defoe 91). The tone of the passage demonstrates despair and longing for freedom.
Discussion
The Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift’s The Humble Offer is a powerful political satire about the economic and social conditions of the poor in Ireland under British rule. The author describes the plight of the Irish people at the beginning, practically “lulling” the vigilance of an unprepared reader (Swift 99). He talks for a long time about how brilliant and rationally verified his idea is so that it seems that now he will open the eyes of the reader. The whole text is permeated with malicious irony over the image of a man who is confident that his proposal can change the life of the country and improve it. In this passage, Swift perceives “irony” as the best weapon for attacking all kinds of vices and injustices that prevail in society: “They die and decompose every day from cold and hunger, dirt and parasites as quickly as can reasonably be expected” (Swift 100).
Swift’s satirical way of presenting ideas is noticeable, since initially, he shows sympathy for poor people, stating that they are poor and do not have enough money to raise their children. Thus, there is an urgent need to make a decision for the well-being of the “Commonwealth”. His suggestion is that parents brutally kill their children by selling them and receiving money in return. The essay was written by Swift in agony and is addressed primarily to the English administration.
Conclusion
Swift’s masterful use of irony to make his main argument- that the Irish deserve better treatment from the British – powerful and terribly funny. In “A Modest Proposal” Jonathan Swift uses literary techniques of satire, imagery, hyperbole, wordplay, irony, and paralysis. The word “modest” is ironic, because the narrator’s sentence in this essay is not modest at all. Most would find this outrageous: the narrator suggests “poor women raise their children like livestock, fattening them up so they can sell them to rich people when they turn a year old” (Swift, 2018) He wrote a “Modest Proposal” as an attempt to persuade the Irish Parliament to improve the living conditions of the poor. Swift used the idea of eating children as a metaphor for what he saw as the exploitation of the poor, such as the high rents charged by landlords.
Works Cited
Defoe, Daniel. “The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.” The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Bucknell University Press, 2022, pp. 78-90.
Swift, Jonathan. A modest proposal and other stories. GENERAL PRESS, 2018, pp. 98-101.