Who is Shaw's spokesman in Arms and the Man?
Bluntschli is the spokesperson for Shaw's ideas in this play. A Swiss mercenary (a soldier working for pay, not out of patriotism), Bluntschli ends up hiding out in Raina's bedroom. He is being pursued for deserting.
Bluntshli is irreverent and free-thinking. Like Shaw, he is a pacifist who thinks that...
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war is ridiculous. He strongly attacks the tendency to romanticize war as heroic and glorious. As he explains to Raina, who herself has been taught to glorify warfare, her fiance, Sergius, is not heroic. He led his troops to victory only by being less incompetent than his grossly incompetent opponent.
Bluntshli is a spokesman for a blunt realism that sees the world clearly, not through a romantic haze. He, like Shaw, challenges notions of class and ethnicity. Sergius and Raina are not really in love, but are playing out a false drama of pretending to be in love because they are both upper-class Bulgarians who feel they "ought" to be together. However, Sergius is really in love with the lower-class servant Louka, while Raina falls in love with the "enemy," Bluntshli. Like Bluntshli, Shaw believed that class and ethnicity are artificial barriers that divide people. The play ends happily when the characters are sorted out to be paired with the right partner.
Who is George Bernard Shaw's spokesperson in Arms and the Man and how?
One of the best ways to see who speaks for the playwright in Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw is to read the Preface. Shaw is notorious for writing long, entertaining essays as prefaces to his plays which explore many of the issues he is addressing and guide his audiences in interpreting his plays.
This play was first performed in 1894 and was written partly in response to the real, historical Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885, a war deeply unpopular with the Serbians and eventually concluded by a treaty which actually changed very little.
Shaw's aim in the play was to show that war is not glamorous and heroic, but a grimly practical business. He makes fun of what he considers the silly romantic posturing of Sergius and uses the persona of Captain Bluntschli, a reluctant soldier with few illusions, to express his opinions. In one way, the marriage in the end is a triumph of the realism of the "chocolate cream soldier" over romantic ideals, but even more profoundly, it is a statement that real love and romance are not about verbal hyperbole and roleplaying, but about sharing ideas and goals in everyday life.