The War Prayer

The story’s lack of specificity lends it an allegorical quality. It could be set in any place and time. The focus is less on the individual characters and more on the ideas that the characters represent. The story carries moral lessons about patriotism, religion, and ignorance. Twain uses the church to represent the country as a whole, full of destructive nationalism and religious zealotry. The stranger personifies ideas that run counter to these currents, like pacifism, reason, and Christian charity. The story’s brevity enhances its allegorical quality. It is easily remembered and retold, a sort of fable intended to instruct generations beyond Twain’s own.

Components of satire include hyperbole, irony, and juxtaposition, all of which are present in “The War Prayer.” Twain exaggerates the country’s nationalism when he writes that “in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism” (Paragraph 1), and both the minister’s prayer and the stranger’s prayer are full of irony. The minister asks the “ever-merciful and benignant Father” to help the country’s soldiers “to crush the foe” (Paragraph 3), an oxymoronic statement in which readers see the incongruity of the minister’s words even if the minister and churchgoers do not.