An Overview of A Modest Proposal: Swift’s Persona as Absentee Jacquelin Mulholland College

In his 1976 essay “A Modest Proposal: Swift’s Persona as Absentee”, Robert Willson examines Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal through analyzing and discussing the meaning behind his offensive proposal, revealing a clear message from Swift - “…to warn of the imminence of total destruction for the Irish people [at the hand of English control and exploitation]” (Willson 9). Willson begins his analysis by comparing several popular interpretations of Swift’s “proposal”, systematically discrediting each one and finally culminating in confidently revealing his own interpretation. The author also carefully examines the personal characteristics of the narrator and the discrepancies he conveys during his devious planned proposal, which lend to Willson’s idea that Swift intended this strange and ludicrous proposal to alert the audience to Ireland’s real demise.

To support his analysis of A Modest Proposal, Willson describes several well-known theories regarding Swift’s message and motivation for the proposal, and discusses why each one does not have the full picture. Landa focuses on the narrator as a selfish economist who Swift uses to criticize commercial policy. Price views the narrator as a politician - an “eager collaborator” to the...