How to Win Friends and Influence People Literary Elements

Self-Help/Motivational non-fiction

Primarily America from the Civil War to the Great Depression

First-person narration from the perspective of the author

Uplifting, optimistic, and psychologically motivational

Protagonist: Optimistic, benevolent self-interest; Antagonist: Pessimistic, negative selfishness

The major conflict is in the title: not getting your way versus getting your way.

The book is structured so that each piece of advice builds naturally on top of the most immediate piece of advice. Thus, it follows that the climax of the book is the very last nugget of wisdom offered: “Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.”

In the very first chapter, just a few pages in, after first explicating through example, Carnegie writes: “Criticism is futile” and “Criticism is dangerous.” This observation/assertion foreshadows the fundamental principle that underlies all the specific advice to come: in order to successfully influence another, one must above all else make that other person happy about being influenced.

“Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him.” This quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson is repeated twice in the book, in two different chapters and in two different forms of context, The first use becomes an example of hyperbole: quite clearly Emerson did not really think of everybody he met as being superior. In the second use, the context is changed and the quote become an understated way of saying the reverse of what he meant hyperbolically: every man he meets thinks of himself as superior to Emerson and from that feeling of superiority can Emerson learn something.

Although many historical and fictional names and events are mentioned in the text, they are always explicated fully rather than existing unexplained as mere allusion.

Shakespearean quotes populated the narrative in such a way as become imagery that comments upon the advice being doled out: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking make it so…proud man / Drest in a little brief authority, / Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven…Assume a virtue, if you have it not.”

Carnegie’s advice on becoming a good conversationalist is paradoxical in that the advice essentially boils down to being a listener rather engaging in conversation.

Two examples for the price of one: “The truth has to be made vivid, interesting, dramatic. You have to use showmanship. The movies do it. Television does it. And you will have to do it if you want attention.”

Notorious bank robber of the 1930s, John Dillinger, turns his own name into an example of synecdoche by associating it with all his multifarious nefarious deeds at a key moment in his criminal career: “When the FBI agents were hunting him, he dashed into a farmhouse up in Minnesota and said, `I’m Dillinger!’”

“Do you ever stop to think that a dog is the only animal that doesn’t have to work for a living? A hen has to lay eggs, a cow has to give milk, and a canary has to sing. But a dog makes his living by giving you nothing but love.”