s in life" (Brecht 859), the truth is that she is concerned with the next few minutes of activity, with worms in the food and so on, and not with long-term goals and still less of higher things.
Brecht poses dialectical choice between engagement with immediate experience of war or contemplation of something beyond it, resolving the dialectic by seeing that each choice entails problems. Undoubtedly, Mother Courage is engaged with nothing beyond the immediate, with no ideals, no structure of experiences that might inflect a given moment and bring a measure of judgment to it. The decisions Mother Courage makes torment her, not for emotional reasons but rather with the need to be adequate to the burden of immediate responsibility. This fact dominates her consciousness, and there is no room for idealistic contemplation.
To say that Mother Courage is forced into profiteering and cowardice by war may not be exactly on the mark, inasmuch as such a judgment focuses more on the personality of the character than epic-theatre theory presumably intends. What h
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