Very Little Butter in the Battle
The irony begins with the title. “The Butter Battle Book” sounds like it is going to be a story about a battle where butter is actually used as weaponry or some kind of tactical strategy. Ironically, the story turns out to be one that tells of a war over how to use butter marked preciously few battles at all and none of any serious consequence.
The War Over Butter
Of course, the entire story is ultimately an ironic commentary on the nature of war. The two opposing sides in this conflict stockpiling weaponry bringing them to the point of mutual destruction over the issue of which side of the bread to butter is utterly absurd, of course, which only deeps the irony of the real-life issues which it allegorically reflects: essentially, whether one should be able to own private property or not.
Literary Irony
Any story that pits one of two possible outcomes against each other only to end by providing neither is a case of literary irony in the sense that the fundamental question of all fiction is “how does it end?” The truth about this book is that it does not end, it merely reaches a stopping point at which that fundamental question remains unresolved. The inherent literary irony of the ambiguous ending is doubled when applied to children’s stories are designed not just to tell a story, but to teach how to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end.
Irony within Ironies
The issue for the wartime atmosphere that builds up the tension in the conflict between the Zooks and Yooks is, of course, which side to butter bread on. Ironically, the situation intensifies all the way to that standoff point of assured mutual devastation for reasons having nothing to do with butter at all. The wall that is constructed to separate the two don’t present either side carrying out their preferred matter of buttering nor does stimulate attempts by one side to actively change the other. None of the weapons that are increasingly developed do anything to either stop or change the whole butter methodology. It is so ironic as to absurdly seem as if they are not even really going to war over butter at all!
Isn’t it Ironic That…
The greatest irony of the narrative becomes the central irony of the book. The Yooks and the Zooks—who really don’t seem much different from each other except for color of attire and preference for where the butter goes on bread—engage in a massive arms race that results in a proliferation of weaponry that finally leaves both sides at a tense standstill in which one accidental mistake on either side ensures mutual devastation to all. Ironically, every single event that occurs in the narrative could have been avoided merely by sitting down to meet, talk and map out a course of mutual acceptance of the right of the other to butter their bread however they want.
The irony of the narrative can be extrapolated to the real world situation that it allegorizes with the very strong suggestion that billions upon billions of dollars could have been saved and put to to far more constructive use. In addition, billions of anxious minds could have been put at rest over the course of decades simply by the U.S. and Soviet Union agreeing to let the other side butter their ideological bread however they wished without trying to impose it upon the other. Of course, political ideologies are much more complicated and far more ingrained than food preferences, so it is hardly an equitable comparison. Right?
