The Fallacy of Success

Tone is the representation of an author’s attitude toward a topic and toward readers through style, word choice, and more. “The Fallacy of Success” showcases Chesterton’s distinct tone. He is derisive toward his subject—books on success. Chesterton uses diction to denigrate these books—he uses such adjectives as “silly,” “dull,” “queer,” “strange,” and “absurd.” He takes delight in mocking these books, but he avoids sourness or preachiness by inviting readers to participate in his fun. Chesterton writes in accessible language and strives to make his readers feel like intimate friends who share his secret pleasure of seeing through the books’ pretense. Rather than alienating readers by representing himself as the only voice of reason or by using erudite argumentative strategies to make his case, he uses a tone of comradery, humor, and common sense.

Humor is the technique of making an audience laugh: It can help retain readers’ attention, set them at ease, and make authors seem fun and likable. Humor is a literary device that makes use of other devices. In Chesterton’s essay, irony, satire, and sarcasm are noticeable strategies for achieving humor. It is ironic, or contrary to what one might expect, that books about success “are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books” (1). Chesterton’s imaginative parodies of the kind of writing he is criticizing are satirical; they lampoon the genre’s style and content. His remark about an excerpt from the article “The Instinct that Makes People Rich”—“It is so practical; it leaves so little doubt about what should be our next step” (3)—drips with sarcasm, a form of verbal irony in which one says the opposite of what one means. Chesterton employs such humor to suggest hidden truths, which is why he focuses on the mythological detail of the barber reporting the hilarious secret of Midas to the reeds. Chesterton himself is doing the same thing: The essay is his work of whispering the ridiculous truth to his attentive “reeds,” i.e., readers.