Analysis of Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw Essay -- Plays Geo

Analysis of armor and the Man by George Bernard Shaw Arms and the Man starts with gunfire on a dark street in a small town. The sentimentalist and willful Raina is about to begin her true-life escapade by sheltering the handsome fugitive Bluntschli, enemy of her equally handsome fianc Sergius The lay of the play is in state of war-torn Bulgaria, and focuses not only on the dawdle between the young people of the play, but the atrocities that go on during war times and the ability of people not so very farther removed from these atrocities to ignore them completely. Shaws purpose in this play is to attack the romantic notion of war by presenting a more realistic moving-picture show of war, devoid of the idea that such death and destruction are twain noble and romantic. These deconstructions make Arms and the Man a satirical drollery about those who would glorify the horrors or war. Shaw develops a perfectly ironic rail line between the two central male charac ters form the beginning to the end. At the start of the play we are given an account of Major Sergius Saranoffs, a handsome young Bulgarian officer, victory in a brassy cavalry raid, which turned the war in favor of the Bulgarians over the Serbs. In contrast, Captain Bluntschil, a professional soldier from Switzerland, acts like a coward. He climbs up to a balcony to escape capture, he threatens a woman with a gun, and he carries chocolates rather than cartridges because he claims the sweets are more useful on the batt...