The correct answer is C. He causes the reader to distrust the narrator.
Indeed, the proposal of growing poor Catholic children is so preposterous, so brutal and inhumane that the reader cannot possibly believe that such proposition is actually a serious one, despite the very serious language used by Swift. This stark contrast and direct opposition between the serious language and the utter aberration of the proposal it conveys are an instance of literary irony, where the effect of such serious language is intended to be the exact contrary: never to take the language seriously and carefully analyze its implicit intent.
Swift is targeting two particular social groups with his ironic proposal. The first group would be Protestant Irish Landlords (upper classes). He clearly speaks about them in very negative terms since they oppress Irish Catholic tenants just because of their religion:
- “Of teaching landlords to have at least one degree of mercy towards their tenants”. He clearly says that landlords need to learn mercy towards their poor tenants (the Irish Catholics).
- "I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children." Here he says that these landlords have exploited and abused their Irish Catholic tenants and that naturally they can do the same with their children (the humor is meant to criticize the landlords).
- "Thus the squire will learn to be a good landlord". Swift is actually saying that landlords are NOT good naturally. They need to learn to be good.
- " The poorer tenants will have something valuable of their own, which by law may be made liable to a distress, and help to pay their landlord's rent, their corn and cattle being already seized, and money a thing unknown. So, not only have the landlords possession of the rent, cattle and corn produced by the Irish tenants, they will also own their children and eat them. Here Swift is actually criticizing the fact that landlords have taken everything from their Irish tenants, only the children are left but not for long.
- Such a perpetual scene of misfortunes, as they have since gone through, by the oppression of landlords. Again, Swift is denouncing the oppression of the Irish tenants at the hands of Protestant Landlords.
Finally, the second group Swift is criticizing is Mercantilists (Politicians). He wrote this text in 1729 when Mercantilism was huge and the Industrial Revolution was beginning. Mercantilist merchants all over the British Empire allied with British nobility to accumulate all wealth, excluding the rest of the population as well as rival empires. Under this concept, people were no longer considered people but actually as a "commodity", a merchandise.
- "I am assured by our merchants, that a boy or a girl before twelve years old, is no saleable commodity, and even when they come to this age, they will not yield above three pounds, or three pounds and half a crown at most, on the exchange; which cannot turn to account either to the parents or kingdom, the charge of nutriments and rags having been at least four times that value. "
- "For this kind of commodity will not bear exportation, and flesh being of too tender a consistence, to admit a long continuance in salt, although perhaps I could name a country, which would be glad to eat up our whole nation without it.
Clearly, Swift is using irony to criticize these two groups.
