Symbolism In The Butter Battle

1351 Words6 Pages

In Dr. Seuss’s, The Butter Battle Book he uses seemingly harmless items to make connections to the cold war, a potentially deadly war. He does this by using symbolism and themes to bring attention to the matter. Seuss wrote the book to show how bad an arms race and specifically nuclear weapons are for the world. .He also uses more specific examples to add meaning to his story. Some of these include the “Big Boy Boomeroo” that symbolizes the atomic bombs, Grandpa and Van Itch representing the armies of the two countries in the cold war, and the fight of two different ideologies, the allies a more democratic ideology and the Soviets a communist regime. Seuss also uses many themes to make a comparison to the Cold War. One of the themes is the competition between the two sides. Another is the fight for power of the land. The third is the fight for modernization and creation of new technology. The cold war was a war between the United States and the Soviet Union and allies of the two. The cold war was called that because no side ever dropped a nuclear bomb causing it to go “hot”. After World War II where both countries fought together tension grew when the Soviet Union began to take over eastern …show more content…

This theme means that each side is trying to modernize their technology to get a leg up on the other side. This is used numerous times in “The Butter Battle Book”, one of these times is when the yooks use the snick-berry switch and it is shot into pieces. This shows that since the snick-berry switch was working the zooks had to design a way to beat it so they could have dominance over the wall. This is shown when Seuss writes “Then one terrible day a very rude Zook by the name of VanItch snuck up and slingshotted my Snick-Berry Switch” (6)! Since the looks had control of the wall which means that what the zooks were doing was not adequate the zooks had to design new and more modern equipment to regain

Open Document