by Peter Sinclair

Created on: April 03, 2009

Moral Self-Scrutiny in Jonathan Swift's, "A Modest Proposal": The Joke is on the Reader.

Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" is the greatest study of a sustained ironic voice in literature. Many authors and poets assume a persona in their work-Swift called it a "mask"-in order to acheive ironic distance between the author and his or her subject matter. Chaucer's narrative voice in The Canterbury Tales makes the point-of-view almost blithely detached from the human folly and vice he describes. Often, Chaucer's narrator revels in his delineation of odious human character, admiring humans like a decadent fascinated with dark aesthetics irregardless of moral questions. Such a narrative voice that suspends judgment places the responsibility for morally or ethically assessing the subject matter of a text squarely in the reader's hands. The distance an author creates between the voice in a narrative or a poem and his or her moral partricipation in or judgment of a text forces the reader to become essentially a critic, and ultimately a self-critic.

The sustained ironic voice tends to dominate modernist literature. Robert Frost wrote nearly all of his poems from the persona of a folksy individual who often remains ignorant to anything in the world other to his own narrow point-of-view. His poems that have become monolithic anthology-pieces, like "The Road Not Taken," or "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," are far more trickier than we realize because we mistake the endearing fireside wisdom of the speaker for deep and enduring truths. In fact, the satire in Frost's poetry does not project outward to the foibles of humankind as much as it ruthlessly turns back at us. In the greatest effect irony can acheive, we become the subject of the satire and we do not even know it.

Placing the reader in the unwitting position of the object of satire, Swift brilliantly develops the moral implications of an ironic voice in all of his work. The neo-classicists of the eighteenth century, taking their cues from the ancients, dictated that the aim of satire was to expose the vice and folly of mankind for the purpose of morally reforming society. Jonathan Swift takes satire a step further, emphasizing that reform begins with the reader. An Anglican minister in a post-Reformation world where the individual's experience with faith replaces the communal experience of Catholicism, Swift believed in the centrality of the subject's personal response to sin. However, as a public servant who,

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