Arms and the Man By George Bernard Shaw

             Arms and the Man By George Bernard Shaw 

                  George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was a Nobel Prize and Oscar-winning Irish playwright, critic and socialist whose influence on Western theatre, culture and politics stretched from the 1880s to his death in 1950. Originally earning his way as an influential London music and theatre critic, Shaw's greatest gift was for the modern drama. Strongly influenced by Henrik Ibsen, he successfully introduced a new realism into English-language drama. He wrote more than 60 plays, among them Man and Superman, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Major Barbara, Saint Joan, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Pygmalion. With his range from biting contemporary satire to historical allegory, Shaw became the leading comedy dramatist of his generation and one of the most important playwrights in the English language since the 17th century.

             Arms and the Man, subtitled An Anti-Romantic Comedy, is most obviously an attack on the false ideals of warfare and the soldier’s profession. Late nineteenth century British society, especially the aristocratic element, tended to see war as a noble undertaking and soldiers as brave, courageous, fearless, and honorable. Many military melodramas of the period upheld these ideals, but they were performed for a civilian audience. As George Bernard Shaw has Bluntschli make clear, soldiers themselves do not think this way. Although far from being a pacifist, Shaw demands that war be seen honestly: War makes men tired and hungry, afraid and nervous. In the person of Bluntschli and in his comments about battle, Shaw establishes the opposition with the archromantics of the play, Raina and Sergius. The satire of the play is aimed at the poetic view of war and soldiers and at the commonplace conjunction between soldiers, aristocracy, and love, the staples of the standard military melodrama of the period. When Raina chooses for her mate the practical, professional, middle-class Bluntschli, Shaw breaks the pattern in which only the brave deserve the fair.

            The key elements of the play are really contained in Sergius and Raina, rather than in Bluntschli. Bluntschli never changes in the course of the play; he is the standard against which the others are measured. Raina learns to divest herself of her impossible ideals, ideals that have no relation to real life, and thus becomes a fit partner for the cool and efficient Bluntschli. Sergius believes that he is to be despised because he finds himself unable to match his ideals. Sergius never does come to see the lesson taught by Bluntschli—that the problem is not an inability to live up to ideals but an acceptance of impossible ideals as reasonable and real.

               Arms and the Man is a piercing satire and it is full of laughter and humor. At the same time it is extremely thought-provoking.Actually I think that book is so interesting because in this book , view  of love and war is the main think with  comedic .  Bluntschli is a Swiss solider who fall in love with Raina but she is already against with Sergius. But sergius love louka. At last the comedy of the story turn into tragedy and story builds as we wonder how this love triangle will unravel. i think no one can know what happed at last without finishing the story.

               Arms and the Man is an important play for Shaw because it is the first of his plays to be a public success. In this play, Shaw makes his first fairly direct attack upon false idealism, an attack aimed not so much at conscience as at attitudes. Certainly, the play elicits more laughter than any of Shaw’s other plays, either before or after. In contrast to the other plays, the laughter in Arms and the Man tends to be more agreeable to many because Shaw uses so many of the traditional devices of comedy.

              The play is also important because it marks the shift from Shaw’s earlier propagandistic plays on social topics to more benign-seeming attacks on the romantic, idealistic follies of humankind. The social reformer of the earlier plays has shifted methods, though not goals, realizing that he must change attitudes before he can appeal to consciences. Whether propagandist or anti-idealist, however, Shaw does not simply want idle laughter. He maintains that it is easy to make people laugh—he wants to make people think.