“All The King’s Horses” is a short story written by Kurt Vonnegut in 1951 that was released as part of Welcome To The Monkey House, which is an allegory for the cold war and the resulting paranoia that was occurring at the time it was written. Even though war was never officially declared, The United States and Russia engaged in espionage, secret campaigns and other such animosities that resulted in paranoia. Despite the absence of a traditional battlefield, Vonnegut uses the chessboard as a powerful allegorical representation of war and argues that war forces regular people to sacrifice their humanity and emotions in order to survive. Bryan Kelly, as a Colonel of the US army is sometimes forced to make immensely difficult decisions for the greater good, Colonel Kelly actively acknowledges the fact that “a chess game, much like a chess game, can very rarely be won without sacrifices” (Vonnegut 3). His knowledge of this taught him that war demands that he renounce his humanity, and regard people’s lives as nothing more than part of the game, so that he can think logically and without emotion. Kelly learns this after he thinks of the people emotionally which shatters Kelly’s calm, “and with it the illusion of the game. The pieces in his …show more content…
Kelly is forced to sacrifice his own son in order to save fourteen lives, his wife “can not understand that he has to be this way, that in his coldness is their only hope for survival”(Vonnegut