The Birds :: essays research papers fc

Satire defined is A composition in verse or prose retentivity up a vice or folly to ridicule or lampooning individuals&8230 The drug abuse of ridicule, irony, sarcasm, etc, in speech or writing for the ostensible design of exposing and discourage vice or folly (Johnston, 5). In other words, ridicule is the use of humor to expose moral behavior of man. In the Aristophanes play The Birds, satire is used to mock the common Greeks dream of ruling the gods that they worship. It mocks the power that they assay to become the supreme ruler of the world. To understand Aristophanes use of satire, one must first understand the role satire plays in sending out its message.At the basis of satire is a sense of moral dishonor. This outrage is wrong and needs to be exposed. The goal of a satire is to castigate this misconduct of man in a humorous way that makes the hearing relate to the problem and try to correct it. Satire seeks to use laughter, non just to remind us of our common often ridiculous humanity, yet rather to expose those moral excesses, those correctable sorts of behavior which transgress what the author sees as the limits of acceptable moral behavior (Johnston, 5). In exposing these foibles, one could discover non to behave in such a manner by realizing his or her mistakes.When setting up a satire, one must do so in a few steps. The first step is setting up a target which will symbolize the conduct that the satirist wishes to attack. In The Birds, the target is the average Athenian citizen, seeking power Pisthetaerus or in Greek translation, companion persuader (Luce, 300). Pisthetaerus is upset with his current living conditions and sets out to seek a new place, far better than his existing residence.Adding exaggeration and distortion to the target, the satirist then emphasizes the characteristic he wishes to attack. The target must be reason out enough to the real thing for us to recognize what is going on, exclusively sufficiently distorted to be funny, an exaggeration, often a grotesque firing from normality (Johnston, 17). After deciding to create a city strategically set between heaven and earth, so the birds can rule god and man, Pisthetaerus ingest a magical root that has the powers to give behave to wings. Although it is evident that valet de chambre growing wings is not imaginably possible, the birth of wings does give birth to the power that Pisthetaerus craves more of.