Dr. Seuss Use Of Imagery In The Butter Battle Book

Dr. Seuss is a well-known author of children’s books, but what is less obvious is the satirical backbone of his stories. In one such book, The Butter Battle Book, Seuss goes on to tell a story about the competition between America and Russia during the Cold War. It starts showing the petty conflict between two peoples that quickly escalates to a pseudo-war. Each side begins to create weapons designed to outdo each other until each side ends up making the same devastating bomb. The book ends with a representative of each side threatening to destroy the other but neither committing to the act. Dr. Seuss is an author who best used writing craft to convey meaning because his ability to show the pointlessness of the Cold War was very obvious, even to the point where a child could understand. He was best at using literary devices like imagery, parody and exaggeration to get his point across.

Seuss is well known for his illustrated children's books; the illustrations are usually cartoony and depict impossible things but what is not usually noticed is the fact that his pictures usually represent something else. For example, as The Butter Battle Book progresses [punctuation error] the wall, introduced in the first pages, continues to get higher; this represents the Berlin Wall. Another example found in The Butter Battle Book is the increasingly outrageous outfits and weapons the Yooks and Zooks use; it helps show how desperate each side was to outdo the other. Near the end of The Butter Battle Book Seuss uses a small, purple egg looking thing to represent the atom bomb; he is showing how the smallest thing in existence can also be the most powerful