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Advice To Youth

Mark Twain's speech 'Advice to Youth' uses satire to critique the flawed wisdom of elders advising the younger generation. He encourages young people to think critically, be cautious of advice, and develop their own judgment rather than blindly following authority figures. Through humor and wit, Twain highlights the hypocrisy of adults and the importance of individual thought.

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195 views4 pages

Advice To Youth

Mark Twain's speech 'Advice to Youth' uses satire to critique the flawed wisdom of elders advising the younger generation. He encourages young people to think critically, be cautious of advice, and develop their own judgment rather than blindly following authority figures. Through humor and wit, Twain highlights the hypocrisy of adults and the importance of individual thought.

Uploaded by

chessonlyfor2009
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Advice to Youth by American writer and humorist Mark Twain is a speech

written in 1882 that, employing the literary device of satire, exposes


the fallacies of elders giving advice to the young generation despite being
flawed themselves. Twain hints at the ills of blindly heeding advice; he
urges people to develop their own minds and think critically. Throughout the
essay, he employs wit and humor to expose the older generation’s
hypocrisy and the authority figures’ dishonesty in conducting themselves.

Advice to Youth | Summary


The speech begins with Mark Twain saying that he has been asked to give a talk
to the younger generation that should be “didactic”, or a lesson in “good
advice”. In the first paragraph, he tells his audience to listen to their parents
only when they are present because if they don’t, their parents will make
them anyway. One needn’t act on their own judgment when parents think
they know better than their children.

He then tells the young generation to be respectful to their superiors, if


they have any. If anyone offends them, then they should calmly take a step
back and hit them when they get a chance instead of taking any extreme
measures. If the offense was not intended, confess that the striking was not
intended either.

Going to bed early and rising early is wise. Rising with a lark is the best, should
one train the lark to wake up at half past nine. About lying, Twain says that one
must be very careful or they will get caught. If the lie is single and unfinished,
the liar will definitely be caught. Lying is a great art, and one must
have patience, diligence, and attention to detail to craft the perfect lie. He
ridicules the maxim “Truth is mighty and will prevail” and says that the
truth is, in fact, not hard to repudiate, but a good lie is immortal. He gives the
example of the man who “discovered anesthesia” and the lie that has since
prevailed. Saying the truth is better than telling a feeble lie, and one
must learn the art of lying early in life.

The next paragraph is about handling ammunition. He narrates an incident:


four days ago, a grandmother, at the next farmhouse from where he is staying,
sat down to her work, and her grandson picked up an old gun and pointed it
at her. She ran and screamed, and he pulled the trigger at her breast,
thinking that the gun was not loaded, which it indeed wasn’t. Twain asks
his audience not to meddle with unloaded firearms, as they’re the most deadly
weapons created by man. He asks them to think about a situation where, at the
battle of Waterloo, one army was composed of boys with unloaded
muskets while the other army was composed of their “female
relations.” He says this thought makes “one shudder”.
Speaking of books, Twain says that good books are for the young to
read. One must confine themselves to
reading “Robertson’s Sermons, Baxter’s Saint’s Rest, The Innocents
Abroad,” etc.

He ends his speech by hoping that his audience will treasure the instructions
given by him and employ them in their daily lives to build their characters
thoughtfully and mindfully. When they do so, they will realize their character
sharply resembles everyone else’s.

Advice to Youth | Analysis


It is not clear if Twain actually wrote the speech to address an audience or if it
remained a piece of writing. His audience was probably young
Americans. Advice to Youth, written in 1882, is widely regarded as a Juvenalian
satire that employs scorn or savage ridicule to expose perceived social
evils. The speech is specifically directed at young people. The tone is mock-
serious; he claims at the beginning of the speech that he has been asked to
say something didactic, that is, intended to educate or preach, but he goes on
to mock the older generation. The speech can be read as a critique of
authority; in the common fashion in which graduation speeches were
given, Twain primarily advises the audience on six topics, possibly to portray
the insistence of elders to listen to certain advice while being far from
perfect themselves.

By asking the young generation to only listen to elders when they are
present, the author points out that elders cannot accept the fact that they
could possibly be wrong about anything, and the young must follow them in
all regards. He playfully tells the audience that extreme or
immediate violence does no good, and in fact, one must strike when they
get the chance. He talks about lying as an art and unloaded firearms
being the greatest enemies of mankind. He constantly uses caricature
images like a grandson pointing an unloaded gun and a grandmother
screaming for the humor to stay intact throughout the speech. Even the
books he asks the young to read are didactic and biblical, which is contrary to
what children should read to cultivate a healthy habit of reading.

He asks young people to live up to the illusion of obeying their


parents because, in his view, it makes everything simpler for everyone. This is
because they “think they know better than you“, implying that parents do
not necessarily know better every time, but they refuse to listen to reason.
Twain is a humorist, and his writing style is such that it keeps a reader or
listener entertained. Twain’s speech is not meant to be taken seriously; rather,
it challenges the existing notions of wisdom and moral behavior at the
time. Twain urges the young generation to be cautious of the advice they
constantly receive because people are not perfect themselves.

The ending of the speech is particularly important; he claims that once the
young people have taken all his advice and done exactly as he has advised
them to, they will see :

“how nicely and sharply it (their character) resembles everybody


else’s”.

Twain covertly says that while the elders indulge in being didactic and dole
out advice to the young generation, asking them to follow their words as
the gospel, in reality, they have mastered the art of lying, as Twain advises
in his speech, and are flawed and vain as people. The authorities that he
attacks are more often than not unreasonable and try to make the young
follow in their footsteps by keeping up a pretense of perfection.

Twain ultimately mocks the idea of receiving constant advice from the
elders and treating it as true just because it comes from people who
are older than them; instead, one must make up their own minds about things
because authority figures are seldom perfect. In this sense, the speech is
a call to young people to think critically and act rationally.

About the Author


Called by William Faulkner the Father of American Literature’, Samuel
Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was a humorist,
lecturer, and writer. He is perhaps best known for The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was born
in Hannibal, Missouri, which provides the setting for his aforementioned
works. He adopted the pen name Mark Twain while he was working as a
journalist. His satire and wit, which characterize his writings, connote a keen
observation of American life in the nineteenth century. Interestingly, he
was born shortly after Halley’s Comet and predicted that he would die with
its next sighting; he died a month before Halley’s Comet was seen again.

Twain’s speech, Advice to Youth, is not only humorous in its language and
rhetoric but is also a covert call to young people to not listen to anyone
being ‘didactic’ but rather act out of their own rationality and develop their
own minds. The irony here is that he himself has been ‘asked to’ talk about
something didactic. Twain is a humorist; his works reflect an astute
observation and understanding of society’s workings. It implies a denial
of authority and taking any wisdom with a pinch of salt.

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