Satire

Satire is a form of humour where the writer or speaker tries to make the reader or listener have a negative opinion about something or someone, by laughing at him, making him seem ridiculous. The aim of the satire is not just to amuse, but to make people think about something.

Satire is not only found in literature but in all kinds of pacific ways of expression: music, drawings, comics, poems, etc. Indeed, we’ve got here three documents: a poem, a fable and a picture. We will expose, for each of this three documents, what they want to denounce and then the way their authors have to make it.

Those three documents have in common to highlight a point of view exposed as an attack.

The first one, “The unknown citizen”, a poem wrote by Wystan Hugh Auden in 1939, denounces a society who knows everything about its citizens do but finally doesn’t care about them and their happiness. A citizen is here just a number “JS/07 M378”, referred as “he, his, one”. According to this society, a citizen who is obedient and participates to his country’s economy is a good citizen, we don’t need to know more about him.

Auden use irony and poetry. This unusual contrast calls out and participates to make a message (finally serious) listen. He creates a fictional society to make people think about their own society.

As Jean de la Fontaine in France, Ambrose Bierce removed a fable of Aesop in our second document. This document show us that satire is as old as literature. Aesop, a Greek writer living around the VII -VI century before J.-C, was one of the first to use this kind of expression through fables like “The Ants and the Grasshopper”. In the first version wrote by Aesop, the Ants have the good part, they are right because they have been provident and make their reserve of food during summer whereas the grasshopper was singing. As the result ants are safe of the winter and the grasshopper died of cold and hung because she was lazy.

Twenty four centuries later, Ambrose Bierce denounces in his fable the doubtful morality of members of legislature. In Bierce’s version, the Ants are incarnate by the Members of a Legislature and the grasshopper by a “Honest Miner”.

Too much busy to”schedule of their wealth”, the members are blind of the distress of a poor miner and laugh about him who lose his time working!

This second document is interesting because it’s a fable and the fable is a satire in strictly speaking. A fable takes the shape of a moral lesson and often uses humour and parody with the personification of animals.

My third document is a picture, it appears on the “Animal Farm” ‘s front cover, a novel of George Orwell published in 1945. We see there a pig in suitcase wearing some military medals and a red tie. It both looks incredibly tyrannical and ridiculous. I chose this document because it shows that a drawing can say more of a thought than a long speech. In the historic context of its publication, this satiric drawing comes as a bombshell because everyone is able to understand what it denounces and laughs at. Orwell was a democratic socialist and denounces here the alliance between Britain and Soviet Union. Pigs represent revolutionaries Bolchevics. On this drawing, the pig represents Joseph Stalin. In the story, he is a corrupt pig

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