In the Jungle of Cities

Style and Technique

Brecht's style in «In the Jungle of Cities» is marked by sharp conciseness and deliberate alienation, as if every dialogue is a duel where words become weapons. The language is extremely terse, saturated with urban metaphors in which the city appears as a living, hostile organism, and people as its prisoners and adversaries. Brecht masterfully employs the technique of alienation: he destroys the illusion of theatricality, forcing the reader to recognize the artificiality of what is happening, which is manifested in abrupt scene changes, concise stage directions, and the absence of psychological detail. The structure of the narrative resembles a chess game — each episode is constructed as a move leading to inevitable confrontation. The author deliberately avoids smooth storytelling, breaking the text into short, tense scenes where the characters' inner conflicts are revealed through their actions and lines. Brecht's literary devices include irony, grotesque, contrast, and a peculiar lyricism that arises at the intersection of prose and drama. All this creates a sense of cold, almost mechanical struggle, where human feelings and passions are subject to the laws of the city-jungle, and reality itself becomes an arena for philosophical experiment.