that Swift's rhetorical
style persuades the reader to detest the speaker and pity the Irish. Swift's
specific strategy is twofold, using a "trap" to create sympathy for the Irish and a
dislike of the narrator who, in the span of one sentence, "details vividly
and with rhetorical emphasis the grinding poverty" but feels emotion
solely for members of his own class.Swift's use of gripping details of
poverty and his narrator's cool approach towards them create "two opposing
points of view" that "alienate the reader, perhaps unconsciously,
from a narrator who can view with 'melancholy' detachment a subject that Swift
has directed us, rhetorically, to see in a much less detached way."a
