Historically, based on harvest celebrations, mourning ceremonies, religious rituals and festivities of the earliest agricultural communities, carnivals are celebrations produced to honor life. This folkloric phenomenon, which has been maintained since ancient times, is celebrated as a festival of change and renewal with the support of the church and the state during the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods. Carnivals are exceptional festivals where the principles of the existing social life are changed, freedom precedes any value, laws and norms are suspended, respect, authority and seriousness are flouted, people from different strata of society participate without any conditions, and a collective social transformation is experienced. Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) theorizes the peculiar nature of this social phenomenon and adapts it to literature. Putting forward that carnival has existed in different forms throughout the history of literature, Bakhtin tries to reveal how carnival performances that draw on European folk humor are positioned in novel and its influence on the development of this genre. Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World reflects the carnival spirit of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory. The plot of the novel takes place at a time when Brazil had a turning point in its political history. Vargas Llosa states his own adaptation by satirizing, parodying, transforming, humiliating and exaggerating the events and characters of the Battle of Canudos, which took place between 1896-1897. The War of the End of the World is a carnivalesque novel in which the social order, moral values and general principles are reversed. Just as the people in the carnivals move to an unconventional life outside of their daily lives, the characters in the novel also move on to an alternative life. In the novel, which is shaped on the conditions created by the changing political and social dynamics in the countryside, a group of people who unite with a free and collective spirit change their struggle for survival. The second life of these people, whose numbers are increasing day by day, is a divine atmosphere emerging from the ordinary repressive context. It is attempted to analyze the carnivalesque spirit of a social movement in The War of the End of the World, a novel reminiscent of carnival squares in which both aspects of life are combined and a unity is exhibited. In the following study, the basic concepts of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque theory are examined particularly in Vargas Llosa’s novel. Carnival performances such as getting out of the usual monotony of life, glorifying the below, discrediting the strong, inappropriate unions, the grotesque body, flouting the social norms and official rules, and disrespect are analyzed.