Mother Courage and Her Children

Despite the length of this play, I found this play to be very interested and did not have a problem reading it front to back in a sitting. It was interesting going from reading plays such as Miss Julie and Six Characters in Search of an Author to reading this play because while this play took place over a period of 30 years, those plays took place in only a few hours. I also found the entire concept of Mother Courage and her canteen cart to be very interesting because it embodies the absolute necessities of life--food, clothing, which is especially important during hard times such as war. While the war causes utter destruction in many towns, Mother Courage acts as a parasite of the war, and supports herself and her family from the war. Ironically, the war takes the lives of her three children, as she predicted in the beginning of the play. The saddest death out the the three children for me was definitely Kattrin's death. As a character, Kattrin was greatly affected by the war, yet surprisingly becomes a true hero at the end of the play. I like how Brecht ended the play because it came as a surprise for me yet left me satisfied.