Working a Prose Set: A Full Walk-Through

The idea

A prose walk-through shows the same discipline on a passage of satire. Suppose the passage is from Swift's "A Modest Proposal," followed by questions on the speaker, the tone, the target, the method and the period. Begin by separating speaker from author: the proposer is calm, reasonable and statistical, and he proposes that the children of the Irish poor be sold as food to the rich, a child being, in his words, "a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food." Recognize the method: irony, saying the opposite of what Swift means, delivered in the deadpan voice of a reformer who believes he is helping. Name the tone: cool and businesslike on the surface, savage beneath, which makes the essay Juvenalian rather than Horatian. Identify the target: English exploitation of Ireland and the economic reasoning that treats people as commodities, the very reasoning the proposer displays. For the period question, the satirical essay, the mask and the target point to the eighteenth century's Augustan satire, the age of Swift and Pope, not the Restoration stage or a Victorian argument. For the meaning question, choose the option that states the satire's purpose, exposing cruelty, and reject any option that attributes the proposal to Swift himself or reads the essay as a serious economic plan. The same sequence, speaker, method, tone, target and period, then elimination, works for any prose set, whether a novel's narrator, a Victorian essayist's argument or a modern story's epiphany, because each asks you first to decide who is speaking and what that voice is doing.