1. The voice of the speaker in this passage is not Jonathan Swift. Much like a poem can have a speaker who is not the poet, the author takes on a persona to narrate this proposal for Ireland. What are distinct charcteristics of the persona that Swift undertakes in the passage? Where in the passage does it give clues as to these characteristics of the speaker (give quotes to support your answer)? How is this persona different from the actual author?

Question

2. One of the purposes of the piece was to ridicule the social reformers who gave “easy” answers to the problems of society without taking into account the effects of implementing these changes. (For example, someone today might suggest “If people don’t want to get vaccinated, then let’s just send them all to a remote village instead of letting them infect the rest of the population,” or “If we just gave each of the homeless people one of the houses that aren’t selling, then there wouldn’t be any homeless people or derelict houses.”) How can you tell that Swift disapproves of these “easy” answers?

I usually don’t ask for this but my teacher gave me a zero because I didn’t answer them well so please help me!

Answer 1

What were the original directions?

Answer 2

1) If you read the passage, you'll see that there are things about the speaker of the passage that are not the same as Jonathan Swift. Your lesson should have given you a bit of background information on him, so that should help. One of the things that often go wrong in a question like this is that students add a lot of quotes but no real answer. If you have an idea of what kind of person the author was, and you can tell that the speaker of the passage is different than that, go back to the text and put your finger on what made you think it was different. If you have a solid answer you can support with text, then you'll likely get credit.
2) Same with this one. What about the text made you think that he didn't really mean it? This may not be a one-sentence or one-phrase quote, but it may be a more general quality of the text.

I think what really helps in these situations is to stop and think before you try to find quotes. After having read the text, what answer is the first that pops into your head? Why did you think that? Was there a part of the text that made you lean that direction? Sketch down these thoughts, and then craft an answer. Don't try to write an answer without having an idea first.
:)

Answer 3

The proposer in the story was a cook and an American. He talks about cooking up kids in a fricassee. Jonathan Swift was an Irish priest, so you can tell that he was different from the proposer.

You can tell he didn't approve of the easy answers because he talks about how easy it would be to gather everyone into pens and make them work instead of become thieves. If it was really that easy, then the Irish would have done it already.

Answer 4

Swift is famous for his hard hitting analysis of the day, yet many people don't realize his vast amount of traveling had greatly altered his paradigm of thought regarding enough food for a growing population. The Anglican influence of his youth was gone and replaced by the hard hitting reality of Darwinian principles of survival of the fittest. To explain these ideas he often used the persona of a musician that could not read music. Therefore the hard but necessary decision had to be made to survive and serving up missing, misguided, miscreants became a specialty of his at dinner parties he hosted for the elite and powerful in an attempt to provide some relief for the suffering of the poor children throughout the British Empire.