SOURCE: Lockwood, Thomas. “Swift's Modest Proposal: An Interpretation.” Papers on Language and Literature 10, no. 3 (summer 1974): 254-67.

In the following essay, Lockwood examines the role of the “economic projector” or narrator of A Modest Proposal, and his objective, if appalling, irony.

The Modest Proposal has always struck readers as perhaps the perfect work of its kind: breathtakingly to the point, unnerving in the extreme. It is so short and in a certain sense so sweet that one is naturally led to wonder exactly how Swift does what he does in this desperately funny, desperately bleak little performance. Until recently, students of Swift have said that the secret of the work is a peculiarly horrifying kind of ironic impersonation, by means of which Swift creates a more or less fictional character, the “economic projector,” who is the putative author of the Proposal. By silently allowing this character to reveal himself...