love is a fallacy

Irony and Humorous V oice: A FormalisticApproach to “Love is a Fallacy”080740713 陈瑛Abstract:Love is a Fallacy is Max Shulman’s short novel and his representative work. Shulman is an American writer, whose writing is famous for humous style. And his writing often focuses on young people, particularly in a collegiate setting, including Love is a Fallacy.Shulman is probably best remembered for his creation of the character“Dobie Gillis”, a typical American teen who frequently suffers from ramantic angst. Love is a Fallacy is a story that lets us know not whether to laugh or cry. Its charm lies in a fine sense of humour and irony, having lifelike characters, and having relaxed and vivid style of writing. Shulman narrates a emotional entanglement just resulting from a raccon coat among three young university students. Enclosing this entanglement, Shulman presents one by one their emotional orientation and value judgement.The author describes Dobie gets pretty but stupid girlfriend in change of raccon coat. In order to cultivate her to be a qualified wife, Dobie teaches her logic painstakingly, but finally she refuses him in use of the logic she has learned. The reason is that she has agreed to be girlfriend of Dobie’s roommate, because “He’s got a raccoon coat.”This paper tries to analyse this short story through the employment of critical approach to literature-formalistic approach.Key W ords: irony, love, formalistic approachThe formalistic critic deals with irony and paradox, with the tensions that result from multiple interactions within the organic from of the literary piece. By theseprinciples,in evidence,Love is a Fallacy is an excellent example. First, the title sets us going. “Love is a Fallacy”in itself reveals the tone of the author-irony and humorous. How can love be a fallacy? It is well-known that love is the greatest refreshment in life, and love is like a butterfly, it goes where it pleases and it pleases where it goes. It is difficult for us to connect love with fallacy. The author’s novel view of love to some extent reflects his irony to Dobie’s view of love. What’s more, fallacies in the novel are what Dobie teaches to Polly, in the end, Polly uses the fallacies to resuses Dobie, which for Dobie is a bolt from the blue. From this angle, the author satirizes Dobie’s unappropriate attitude to love. Besides, the title has two meanings. When fallacy is taken in its ordinary sense, the title means: There is a deceptive or quality about love. When it is taken as a specific term in logic, the title means: Love cannot be deduced from a set of given premises. Love is an error, a deception and an emotion that does not follow the principles of logic.”All these can give powerful evidence.Second, from the body of the novel, apparently, the author employs the formalistic approach to analyse the characters. The whole story is abound in satire and irony. It is satirizing a smug, self-conceited freshman Dobie in a law school. Dobie is made the narrator of the story who goes on smugly boasting and singing pra ises of himself at every chance he could get. From the very beginning in paragraph 4, he starts to keep on himself all the beautiful words of praise he could think of, such as “cool, logical, keen, calculating, perspicacious, cute and astute.” At the same time, he takes every opportunity to downgrade Petey. He considers Petey “dumb as an ox”. Hecalls Petey “nothing upstairs”, “emotional”, “unstable”, and “a faddist”. And as for Polly, she is “a beautiful dumb girl”, who would smarten up under his guidance. It proves to be a big irony for Dobie when the dumb girl goes back to her former dumb boyfriend Petey, just because the latter has a raccoon coat.And the author wants to show that logic may be an interesting subject, “far from being a dry, pedantic subject, is a living, breathing thing, full of beaty, passion and trauma ”. He is exxaggerating for the sake of humor. The author uses a whole variety of writing techniqes to make his story vivid, dramatic and colorful, so then, it has an effect of irony and humor. The lexical spectrum is colorful from the ultra learned terms used by the conceited Dobie to the infra clipped vulgar forms of Polly. He uses figurative language profusely and also grammatical inversion for special emphasis. For example, “First he looked at the coat with the expression with of a waif at a bakery window ”, and “Cool was I and logical”. These add to the tone and the intention of the athor. The author also deliberately makes Polly use a lot of exclamatory words like “Gee”, “Oo”, “wow-wow” and clipped vulgar forms like “relish”, “marvy” to create a character of simple and rather stupid girl. This contrasts strongly with the boasting of the author and thus helps to increase the force of satire and irony.Finally, the unexpected ending is forceful. In our opinion, Dobie teaches Polly logic, in return, Polly would naturally accept Dobie’s love. However, Polly chooses Petey, for the reason that he has a raccoon coat. It is ironic because the whole thing backfires on Dobie when Polly refuses all his arguments as logical fallacies before finally rejecting him. The end of the story finds that Dobie has got what he deserves.He has been too clever for his own good. It proves to be a big irony for Dobie, and a tragedy. He has made great effort, while he achieves nothing at last. His fancy himself clever reaps the fruits of his action. As for Petey, he not only gets the raccoon coat, but gains the love of Polly. Although it is a humorous story, full of irony, it is worthy of our deeply thinking when facing with love. By Dobie’s tragic ending, we can conclude that love is a fallacy and can not be got by every means. Love is not on the premise of change. And nobody can prognosis the result of love. When someone wants to control love with full confidence, actually, he has already been a failure. Therefore, this paper tries to use the formalistic approach to analyse the story, particularly irony and humorous voice to deeply understand the internal meaning of the novel and the intention of the author.。