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figures.

Swift has a moral agenda directed at you, the reader, in "A Modest Proposal." The essay has very little to do with cooking and eating infants, and everything to do with how we respond to the narrative voice. In fact, infant cannibalism is like the tub tossed into the ocean to divert the whale's attention. Our intitial shock over his proposals give way to our shock over the details of his scheme. But if we remain shocked only by the subject matter, the cannibalism of children, we lose the subtle nature of the voice with which the narrator presents all of his carefully thought out and worded "talking points," as we call them today.

An agent and defender of the precepts concerning order and decorum in the Age of Reason, Swift takes satirical aim at order, decorum and reason itself. Deeply Christian, Swift clearly deracinates rationality without charity. Any thought or argument conducted without charity, no matter how rational, is not illuminated by the light of Reason. In short, Reason without Love is not Reason. This theme runs through all of Gullilver's Travels as humans invent all kinds of abominations and do all kinds of hideous things to each other in the name of science, rationality, and progress. Swift loathed the moral anemia of his time that resulted from scientific, rational and abstract thought draining the world of human warmth and charity. His narrator in "A Modest Proposal" shows the dangerous results of rationality that treats suffering in the world with clinical objectivity as opposed to Christian charity. The narrator turns the many starving individual humans in the streets of Dublin into statistics. He objectifies humans, and forms expedient solutions based upon cost-effectiveness. Ultimately, this narrator, who exhibits such clear, rational and mathematical thinking, turns out to be, ironically, stark raving mad. In the end, the division between reason and love results in lunacy.

Yet, the narrator does not exhibit a benign lunacy. Swift constructs his disarmingly humble voice to trick us into thinking that his madness, although it is outrageous, is, nonetheless, quaint. We mistakenly assume that the narrator remains safely tucked away in that realm that we call "eccentric." This is satire, we say to ourselves, and we are supposed to laugh him off the stage, or hoot and howl at him until he flees from parliament. The trap in "A Modest Proposal" does not spring when the narrator informs us, "I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts,"

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