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What are 3 examples of either sarcasm, hyperbole, or understatement in "A Modest Proposal" by Jonathon Swift?

The narrator of this pamphlet, having made his proposal that the poor Irish sell their one-year-old babies as a food source to the rich English, states, "I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children." The first part of this statement constitutes an understatement: he says the food (meat from the carcasses of dead babies) will be "somewhat dear," meaning it will be somewhat valuable. I would venture to say the living baby would be considered very dear to its parents. Swift suggests that the child's only value lies in its cost as a sellable commodity when, in fact, we (and Swift) can all agree, I hope, that a child's life has a great deal more value than this.


The second part of the statement, that landlords "have already devoured" the parents of the children who would be sold in such a manner, constitutes hyperbole. The narrator doesn't mean that the landlords have literally eaten up these poor Irish parents; instead, Swift uses this crafty word choice as a way to point out that this proposal is only making literal what the English have already figuratively done. They have consumed Ireland by buying up all the land and taking food from the mouths of the Irish. The Irish get thinner as the English get fatter. It's an exaggeration, to be sure, to say that the English devour the Irish, but not much of one.


Toward the end of the essay, the narrator says, "let no man talk to me of [other] expedients, 'till he hath at least some glympse of hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice." This line comes after he has already listed a great number of other ways the Irish could acquire more money, the government could run more efficiently, and the English could show some mercy and compassion. His insistence that there is no hope that any of these ideas had been or would be honestly tried constitutes sarcasm on Swift's part. He is blaming the Irish, in part, for their own troubles, and he blames the English for exploiting the Irish into the grave for their own personal gain. No one escapes Swift's scorn.

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