Love is a Fallacy Analysis Essay Example

is infatuated with, as he sees her as a girl that would be fitting for the man he was to become.He believes that when he is a lawyer, he needs to have a beautiful woman as his wife just as he sees all good lawyers do. The only drawback to his plan was that Polly Epsy did not seem to be the brightest girl on campus – much to the contrary; she seems to be quite airheaded. But being the keen and calculating fellow he is, the narrator will educate this beautiful woman and make her more suitable for him.

The narrator proceeds to meet with Polly and teaches her about logic and fallacies, a study which proves to be his downfall.After her lessons, he begins to tell her of his want of her companionship, and she dismisses all of his pleas as fallacious arguments and tells him she is going steady with Petey Burch – because he has a raccoon coat! In the beginning of Love is a Fallacy, Shulman creates the character of the narrator as a egocentric young fellow who thinks quite highly of himself. The narrator seems to be able to disregard the feelings of others in favor of his own ambitions, as shown in the text, “My brain, that precision instrument, slipped into high gear. ‘Anything? I asked, looking at him narrowly. ” This sentence was where the narrator got the idea of trading Petey, who would do anything for a raccoon coat, a coat for Petey’s girl (who really had no “kind of formal arrangement with her”).

Shulman created the picture of the narrator looking at Petey narrowly so that the

reader would imagine an unscrupulous man about take advantage of someone’s weakness in order to emphasis the self-centeredness of the character. After the Narrator retrieves a raccoon coat from his father’s house, he convinces Petey to accept the coat for Polly.Shulman illustrates the inner struggle of Petey while he battles between his want of a raccoon coat to keep up with the latest fad and the thought of giving up the girl he likes for it by writing some dialogue between the narrator and Petey. Petey at first denies the raccoon coat, but then rationalizes his decision to accept the trade by saying it was not as if he and Polly were in love.

Summary of the narrator in Love is a Fallacy

This decision is helped along by the narrator while he goads him into trying on the coat and reiterating Petey’s rationalizing self-talk.This dialogue helps to show the reader the true personas of these two characters; Petey being the impressionable, unstable faddist, and the narrator being the conniving and self-concerned type. The basic fallacies that are taught to Polly are meant by Shulman to also give the reader some groundwork for understanding fallacious arguments. Shulman has Polly point out the very same fallacies that the narrator taught her in his own arguments and declarations of love for her, perhaps showing a hint of intelligence that the narrator taught her – or intelligence that she had all along.In all, Polly and the reader, is taught 8 fallacies: dicto simpliciter, hasty generalizations, post hoc, contradictory premises, ad miscericordiam, false analogies, hypothesis contray to fact, and poisoning the well. Each time the narrator teaches Polly a fallacy, it

is met with great irony later on in the story.

He teaches Polly the fallacy of the hasty generalization, or an argument based on too few examples to support the claim. The narrator tells Polly that they seem to be well matched on the premise that they have gotten along so well together.She retorts by saying that he has made a hasty generalization on the grounds that they have only gone out on 5 dates. Polly is taught the fallacy of false analogy, which included an example of 2 different situations of which one could not make a feasible analogy connecting the 2. Polly is later told, “My dear, five dates is plenty. After all, you don’t have to eat a whole cake to know it’s good.

” To which she replies, “False analogy, I’m not a cake, I’m a girl. These ironies add a very humorous tinge to this educational story, but the greatest irony is when he finds out the reason that Polly is now going steady with Petey now. She replies in a seemingly casual way, “Because he’s got a raccoon coat. ” It was very same coat that was traded for her in the first place.

It appears that this is a two-sided irony. The narrator has lost the girl he traded a coat for by the man who gave him the rights to her, and she is dating a man who had traded her for a coat! However, maybe she knew about the trade the entire time.Maybe Petey and Polly were not as dumb as the narrator might have thought. In his essay, Love in Another Perspective (Takekun, 2006), Takekun believes that Petey

knew that after the narrator slyly left for his dad’s house in the beginning of the story, he figured that he was going to try to bargain for Petey’s girl, with whom the narrator has had a long, well-known crush on. Petey might have alerted Polly to this, and since she was his sweetheart, though not officially, she might have agreed to help him.This of course is speculation, but it would explain the seemingly way to dim-witted vernacular with which Polly speaks.

Her one word reactions such as “wow-dow” and “yummy” might all have been a ploy to exact the newest trend from an unsuspecting egomaniac. Love is a Fallacy is an entertaining story that teaches the use of fallacies and offers a humorous conclusion as to why they should be avoided. Maybe if the narrator would have been up-front with Polly about his intentions for her since the beginning, he would not have found himself in the situation he was at in the end.But then again, that is a hypothesis contrary to fact.