Mother Courage: The Hole In The Cheese
Mother Courage contains a quote that pulls the entire play together so innocuously; it's hard to believe that Brecht originally intended it to be so symbolic. Yet, there it is, in scene six, the chaplain rhetorically asks, "What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?" This line operates on the three essential layers of the play: the level of the character, of the playwright (plot), and of the audience.
On "face" value, this line is said about peace. The chaplain believes that the image of peace as the norm and war as an abnormal event is backward. He sees war as the standard occurrence (the cheese) and peace as merely an interim incidence (the holes in the cheese). Thus peace is nothing without a backdrop of war upon it; a hole is only a hole - it contains nothing. The substance of life is war.
But the chaplain's line wouldn't be as significannot
if it didn't have a more global meaning. In the light of the plot, "What happens to the hole when the cheese......
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