😊 Here below listed are the important aspects about Unit Five.

I.Theme

The text is a piece of narrative writing. The narrator, Dobie Gillis, is a freshman in a law school. He is the protagonist of the story, who struggles against two antagonists Petey Burch, his roommate whose girlfriend he plans to get; and Polly Espy, the girl whom he intends to marry after suitable re-education。

This is also a piece of light, humorous satire. Throughout the story, the narrator takes every possible opportunity to praise himself, by using a variety of adjectives and

a wide range of metaphors and similes. Meanwhile, he looks down upon Petey Burch and Polly Espy, regarding them as having “nothing upstairs” and “a beautiful dumb girl” respectively. In order to smarten Polly up, the narrator decides to give her a course in logic. He teaches her how to recognize some common logical fallacies. Perhaps his teaching is too successful because the whole thing backfires on him when Polly refutes all his arguments as illogical based on exactly the same fallacies that he tries so hard to teach her.

II. Writing Style

Shulman has a good style. The story goes forward at a fast pace with racy dialogues full of American colloquialism and slang. He employs a whole variety of writing techniques to make his story vivid. He uses ultra learned terms to reveal the conceit of the narrator and clipped vulgar forms to illustrate Polly Espy’s limited intellectual capacity. He also uses figurative language profusely and inversion for emphasis. The speed of the narration is maintained by the use of short sentences, elliptical sentences and dashes throughout the story. The combination of all these help to make the story realistic, as one would expect a freshman to talk like that.

III. Implications

The title of the text tells us that it is about love and fallacy. Love is a topic of eternal interest, and one might wonder how love could be a fallacy. In fact, “fallacy” in the title can be interpreted at different levels. On the one hand, when fallacy is taken in its ordinary sense, the title means that “there is a deceptive or delusive quality about love”. On the other hand, when “fallacy” is taken as a specific term in logic, the title means that “love cannot be deduced from a set of given premised”.