the persistent “i-world”: possible worlds in bertolt brecht’s mother courage and her children

The present article attempts to apply marie-laure ryan’s theory of “possible worlds,” as a branch of cognitive poetics, to bertolt brecht’s mother courage and her children (1941) to show how characters’ different treatments of the world, especially mother courage herself, define and move the narrative structure of this play forward. the aim of this study is thus to look into how the characters in brecht’s play define different types of alternative possible worlds, such as knowledge worlds, prospective extensions of knowledge worlds, intention worlds, obligation worlds, wish worlds, and fantasy universes. this reading also hopes to examine what ryan calls “the textual actual world,” and pursue the internal conflicts between the actual world of the text and the private worlds of different characters. central to these conflicts is the conflict between mother courage’s i-world and the play’s textual actual world. her persistent attempts to make money out of the context of war in this play leads to a number of tragic consequences that result from that primary i-world. the study finally concludes in determining these worlds’ interactions and their conflicts, and how they make possible for the plot to develop from one scene to the other. it is by the use of such conflicts and world creations that brecht manages to form his plot and to show his intentions and finally reaches what ryan calls, “tellability”.