Literature Love

The characters in Shaw's play  Arms and The Man  are really arranged in parallel to highlight their distinctive features. The central theme of the play is the different attitudes to war and love. While some of the characters are rallying for romantic, sentimental notions, some are pragmatic and anti- romantic. In the true sense of the term Sergius and Bluntschli are studies in contrast and they constitute the central pair of the plot. They are both soldiers and lovers but their attitudes are pales apart. While Sergius is a self - conscious egotist and a dreamer of dreams, Bluntschli is a plain prudent man of the world with a strong common sense. While Sergius regards himself as a hero of romance and bears a romantic attitude to love and war,Bluntschli is replete with practical intelligence and has contempt for romantic poses and idealistic views of things like war, heroism, love and marriage. Sergius is basicall...

Shaw conceived of Bluntschli almost as a Hegelian character, in the sense that through him he has presented an antithesis of the conventional morality, romantic ideas of love and war and feudal notions of the place of the individual in society. Shaw does all this, however, under a dramatic scheme. The very name ‘Blunt(sch)li’ itself is perhaps deliberately chosen to cover up the potentialities of the man, with which he threatens the fragile facade of the complacent society. Through his character, however, Shaw attacks not only the ethos, romantic ideas and feudal concepts, he also inverts the tradition of the nature and role of the hero in comedy. But it should not be thought that Shaw presented Bluntschli with the sole object of satirising, which is a destructive art; in fact, he presents his unheroic hero from a system of thought that seeks a better society, where the individual’s status will not been determined and fixed by class and gender, but by what s/he is capable of contri...

Raina is one of Shaw's most delightful heroines from his early plays. In the opening scenes of the play, she is presented as being a romantically idealistic person in love with the noble ideal of war and love; yet, she is also aware that she is playing a game, that she is a poseuse  who enjoys making dramatic entrances (her mother is aware that Raina listens at doors in order to know when to make an effective entrance), and she is very quixotic in her views on love and war. Whenever Raina strikes a pose, she is fully aware "of the fact that her own youth and beauty are part of it." When she accuses Bluntschli of being "incapable of gratitude" and "incapable of any noble sentiments," she is also amused, and she is later delighted that he sees through her "noble attitude" and her pretensions. In fact, her attraction for Bluntschli is partly due to the fact that she can step down off the pedestal which she must be upon, metaphorically, whene...