Satire is a literary device

Satire is a literary device which is basically is the used with the purpose of criticizing the behavior of a specific target. This literary device can be defined as “Satire is a technique employed by writers to expose and criticize foolishness and corruption of an individual or a society by using humor, irony, exaggeration or ridicule. It intends to improve humanity by criticizing its follies and foibles. A writer in a satire uses fictional characters, which stand for real people, to expose and condemn their corruption” (Literary Devices, 2015). Although it can be related to something funny and entertaining to use in a poem, it is also used as well to call and request care to a particular matter.

Three examples of satiric works that are well known in literature can be first the book Huckleberry Finn by the author Mark Twain. This author uses the satire literally device to state his ideas and personal judgment about slavery, human nature and different situations that were happening in the American society at that time. “What’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and isn’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?” (Chap 16). A second example is The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope. Alexander makes sure to satirize the upper middle class of eighteenth century England behavior. It makes fun of the vanity of young fashionable ladies and gentlemen and the frivolity of their actions. The third example would be Gulliver Travels by Jonathan Swift; he satirizes politics, religion, and Western Culture.

Jonathan Swift is well known as a prominent satirical English writer of the eighteenth century. In his writing’s, this author uses the satire literally device through the use of exaggeration while providing political and social commentaries. In the poem “A Modest Proposal,” he proposes that the only way to save Ireland from overpopulation and poverty is to kill the children of the poor families and serve their meat as a delicacy to the nobility of Ireland. The purpose of Swift is basically exaggerates the idea because the people of Ireland cannot think in an idea to reduce overpopulation and poverty.

Those who are more thrifty may flay the carcass, the skin of which, artificially dressed, will make admirable gloves for ladies and summer boots for fine gentleman” (A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift).

Jonathan Swift also uses the satire literally device through name calling "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." The island of Laputa, the island of pseudo-science, is literally (in Spanish) the land of "falling women." He also presents a virtue and then turns it into a vice as a use of satire. He takes pot-shots at all sorts of sacred cows. Besides science, Swift debunks the whole sentimental attitude surrounding children. At birth, for instance, Lilliputian children were "wisely" taken from their parents and given to the State to rear.

As a conclusion, the role of satire is to complain and criticize those vices in the society, which the writer considers a threat to civilization. The writer sees those vices as something he needs to expose. The intention is to warn the public and to change their opinions about the conditions occurring in society.