Mother Courage

Blog Post 5

While plays traditionally follow a systematic structure of characters and plot line, Mother Courage And Her Children challenges this expectation by having the reader decipher the context of the play and the significance of objects and characters in the story. Brecht veers away from the norm in the sense that he questions the popular view of the audience. Typically, in order to engage the audience, a play must involve qualities that match the viewer’s belief system. Instead, Mother Courage And Her Children goes against the grain and calls into question the validity of their values in business and war. This play attempts to defy our expectations in such way. Rather than connect with viewers on a level that they are extremely familiar with, the author encourages the audience to give thought to an opinion other than their own. Not only does this make the play stand out from others during its time, it causes the audience to think and analyze the meaning of the pay long after it has occurred. This thought provoking plot line aids to the play’s success at defying our expectations of what a play should be and do at this time.

The play beings with an atypical structure; the traditional progression through time is not apparent. The portion of the play that we have read consists of several scenes that do not connect at first glance. Not only does this way of laying out the scenes helps Brecht to cover large spans of time, but it also aids to the idea that we must develop a back story for ourselves. The chronological order of events is disrupted, provoking the audience to generate their own ideas as to how they connect. Rather than analyze an entire play, Brecht allows us to focus on an individual section of the play on its own.

As a reader, I believe that this way of organizing the play may be a bit disorganized in the way that we must construct ideas for ourselves, but then we are proven to be misguided in the end. Brecht intends for the viewers to have an aversion to the protagonist of the play, Mother Courage, but we, as viewers, are convinced that she must be good at the beginning. The lack of connection throughout the play separates us from the characters, keeping them unfamiliar and easier to dislike. We are only exposed to part of their life, which gives the audience a sense that they do not fully know the characters and that the play feels almost unfinished. While he does accomplish his goal of straying away from the normal and traditional structure of a play, he does so in a way that complicates the story like in a unfavoring way.